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How to Avoid A VoIP Disaster in Your Home

What is VoIP? Simply put, VoIP is telephone service over your high-speed internet connection. This makes it far less costly than traditional phone service because the technology and infrastructure behind the scenes is cheaper and easier to maintain. If you have the right equipment and internet service in your home, VoIP works great and will definitely save you a lot of money.

Doing a little research can go a long way to preventing a VoIP disaster in your home. Here is a short list of things to research thoroughly before considering VoIP.

Your Internet Speed.
Whether you have Cable internet or DSL, you need to have consistent download AND upload speeds over 256k in order to support acceptable voice quality. Google ’speed test’ for a list of sites you can use to check your internet speed. Also be aware that your phone conversations will be sharing your internet connection with your PC. If you’re going to be downloading your music and talking on the phone be aware that unless you have a lot of bandwidth your voice quality could suffer.

Your Internet and PC Hardware.
Once you have a VoIP provider you’ll receive an adapter that you’ll need to plug into the internet. Look at your setup, you may have to add a switch or hub to give you more ports to plug equipment into. A common setup is to have your PC plugged directly into your Cable or DSL modem leaving no where to plug in your VoIP adapter. Adding a small 4 or 8 port switch in between your modem and PC will give you the ports you need. This is like plugging a power strip into an outlet, turning 1 outlet into 6. Also be aware that many Cable and DSL modems connect to your PC via USB instead of Ethernet. This usually disables the Ethernet interface of the modem and will need to be changed over to Ethernet. This may also require you to add a NIC card to your PC to support Ethernet.

Your New VoIP Provider.
VoIP providers are popping up and dropping all the time. While they all basically provide the same product, they vary greatly on how well they take care of their customers. Study up on your prospective providers before making a decision. Hit the internet and read reviews, there are literally hundreds of sites dedicated to rating and reviewing VoIP providers. Customer service differs greatly with these providers, make sure you are comfortable that the provider will take good care of you. Call their customer support line and test their response time to internet requests. Make sure you choose one that offers at least a 30 day guarantee and be prepared to dump them if they can’t get your service running well before that time period expires. There are many customers out there who signed up with a provider who couldn’t get them going only to be bumped around until after the 30 day mark.

By testing your internet speeds, checking your home network setup and researching VoIP providers you will greatly increase your chances of a successful VoIP setup in your home and the monthly saving.

For more information on home VoIP service and providers visit http://www.easyvoipinfo.com

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