How did you get on with this? I am interested generally since I would like to contain my phone bills a bit and also specifically since I am trying to discover how I can get a UK phone number, both for folks back home to dial me on, but also outbound, so it looks like I am dialing from a UK phone number....
...keen to upgrade my Sky service from the free to air stuff to the subscription service and, conscious of admonitions in other posts, don't want to be identified as a jonny foreigner by the blighters at Sky when I phone them to match the card to the box.....
Perhaps you should take the trouble to learn German instead.
I've been using sipcall for about 2 years now - very reliable service and good rates for Switzerland (cell + landlines), Western Europe and the States - horrible rates for Eastern Europe. I use Skype to call my family in Hungary, lots cheaper.
As our landline is on it's last legs... I'm looking at buying a new phone. Alternatives at the moment are the Siemens C455 voip phone or an S455.
I'm uncertain if voip is necessary for the future and if there will be a significant reduction in cost. We have ADSL (bluewin) and swisscom Fixnet landline. The Swisscom page says they would charge an extra Fr. 18.90 for sip (?) monthly for Bluewin Phone. Somehow, this doesn't make much sense to me. We call one number in UK per week on average, so call costs aren't that expensive - it's the landline and the adsl that bumps up our costs. We are not considering changing from bluewin or swisscom at the moment, as they have been very reliable so far...
The S455 has the advantage of an answering machine - I hate combox !
So - my question is, does anyone have any advice or opinions: shall we go for the voip or for the answering machine?
Like many I am not interested in anything proprietary like Skype.
I have recently setup an account with voiptalk.org in the UK
Their prices seem pretty competitive and the advantage for me was they gave me a UK geographic number for free and I was also able to purchase a second (Swiss) number.
So now I have cheap calls to the UK (free on SIP) and my customers in the UK and in Switzerland can still call me whereever I am without them having to incurr an international call.
I use the excellent freeware X-lite softphone on my Mac portable (PC version also available) and also SIP using a normal phone plugged into my Vigor Router in the office. Both work fine, and the SIP gives my proper number as the CLI on outbound calls so would probably fool Sky and the like.
Am still looking for a local VoiP gateway provider to reduce the cost of my calls in/to Switzerland.
Switzernet charges 9 Fr/month for unlimited free calls to CH , US , UK , FR , DE , and for a Swiss phone number 021 or 022 . Rates to Swiss mobiles are the lowest according to www.comparis.ch:
Rounding of calls and call setup fees are hidden costs which "secretly" increase the displayed price by 40% . Switzernet’s does not have any hidden fees. The billing is second by second [[5]](http://switzernet.com/public/070626-rounding-of-minutes/) , [[6]](http://switzernet.com/public/070626-skype-rounding/) , [[7]](http://switzernet.com/public/070625-rounding-and-callsetup/) .
The only expense is 9 Fr/month and a 12 month commitment, but you can cancel the contract within the first 15 days (the trial period is counted from your first successful call).
Until September 30 the shipment is free of charge (instead of 9.50 Fr). During this period Switzernet offers 42 Fr for referred customers (you can self-refer your new accounts). As a referrer, your phone number or your name should appear on new contracts. If it is not made you can inform later to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) . There are no limits on the number of referred customers. The amount credited to your Switzernet account can be transferred to your bank account at any time. More info: http://www.unappel.ch/public/070914-parrainage-refer/
Anyone having experience with Switzernet, please post here.
The problem with switzernet is that they force you to pay this 9 CHF per month, regardless if you need a Swiss number or not.
And commitment to 12 months?! What kind of service is it? First rule for getting new costumers is to allow them easy way out, anytime.
In my case, I wanted to talk freely with my parents back in the home land. For that I bought two SIP modems one for me and one for them. With switzernet I would have to pay 9 CHF for my parents' line just to talk with them over SIP, which should be completely free. This is because I have found no easy way to call across SIP networks.
After an extensive market research I've chosen callcentric.com and I am very pleased with them.
They give you a Swiss number for $6.95, less than 9 CHF.
For the difference of 0.66 cts/month Switzernet offers unlimited free calls to UK , USA , Switzerland , France and Germany (not mentioning a couple of minor destinations).
What concerns a point-to-point connection only between you and your parrents, I believe that you can configure your SIP phones and routers on both sides so as to make free direct calls without any SIP provider.
Excellent, here is an idea: add a documentation about how to do it to your site. I am sure I am not the only one who was put off because of this reason.
On the vertical navigation bar select [ Direct calls between two SIP phones without passing through an SIP proxy ]
In this example we assume that the phones have public IP addresses and are not behind NAT (e.g. Internet access offered by Cablecom is based on public IP addresses).
In case you are behind NAT, you should use a STUN server (the STUN of Switzernet stun.4z.com is free) and you should route the 5060 port to your UA in your NAT router (like when you are using peer-to-peer). Hopefully this will be all you need.
AFAIK there are several open free sip servers for internal communication between local SIP phones. Using such servers make everything much easier.
We're moving from Paris to Nyon soon. Here we have a Freebox ADSL connection with Free.fr and no landline fixed charges. For about 66 CHF this gives us 4 Mbit internet, hundreds of channels of TV, unlimited free calls to landlines in 50 countries including mobiles in US and Canada. For our phone, for instance, I just plug a normal handset into the ADSL router. For the TV, I can use either VLC on the computer or plug in the big screen or even watch TV over WIFI on the laptop which works surprisingly well. Our router was also providing the phone service via WIFI (to any ISP customer within range of our router) but I never had the quadriband handset that made use of the facility. Mostly just plug-n-play too.
As you can see, we have no need for Skype or any of the other services here. Anyway, there is no point to my message other than to show what the future might look like one day. Guess it is time for us to get used to the new country...
It is just because Yaniv asked something special. Otherwise, with Switzernet it is simple. You pay 9 Fr/month, you receive a SIP phone account with a Swiss phone number (you can travel with your SIP phone and your Swiss phone number will follow you without the exhorbitant roaming fees), you have REALLY unlimited amount of calls to CH , FR , US , UK , USA , .. and the calls to Swiss mobiles are the cheapest (btw mobiles are included in USA anyway, there are no differentiation in USA, Canada, Singapore, ... for the calling party). Rates to other international destinations are as low as possible (e.g. China 4 cts/min while with Swisscom 125 cts/min). The billing is second by second (no traditional rounding to the next minute, or call setup fee, or any other form of a hidden cost...).
Hey Lob I have the very same configuration as you but using an Italian VoIP provider ( www.euteliavoip.com ) from which I have around 50ms of latency with Cablecom. Not bad. The best codec I've tested is g711a, they say it's better to select a-law instead of u-law because the first one is used in the PSTN infrastructures, therefore selecting already that codec you don't get signal conversion when it gets to analog.
Only problem I encountered is that with some numbers I get a sort of voice jittering but that really depends on the number I call.
I can't see that anyone has mentioned FRING in this thread, and if you want VOIP, SKype, MSN or Skype over mobile then download it free from www.fring.com to virtually any Symbian or Windows Mobile phone.
I have used it over WiFI (Nokia N95) , GPRS and 3G (Nokia N73), and even with a bluetooth handsfree car kit on a motorway on an international Skype call and it works! It is really quick to configure for Skype and MSN with a wizard. I have not tried SIP but the facility is there. Voice quality is obviously variable with link speed, whilst MSN Instant messaging, and Skype Chat are good.
If you get an high volume mobile data subscription at say 20CHF for 80MB, that gives you about 400 minutes of talking (you pay for speech transmitted as data in both directions). It is the cheapest way of talking on mobile, but if left idling also saps the battery life.
If you have a Wifi capable mobile and are in somewhere like Luzern with a free Wifi city network, you can Skype, SIP, MSN for free on your mobile.
Be warned if you log into Skype, you can get multiple logins concurrently, so if you left your office PC logged in to Skype and then Chat on your mobile I think it gets repeated on both!
I've been using Switzernet for quite a while now and it's working pretty good but when I call the UK the phone cuts every 15 min. I've called Switzernet today and I also sent an e-mail. So, I was wondering If other users have the same problem or it's just me ?
VoIP service provider: www.guest-voip.ch , the web site does a pretty good job of hiding the fact that it is essentially a one man operation. He answers mails in English. 1 number free as long as there is credit on the account. 5 numbers about 5CHF/month. Unified messaging (voice mail and faxmail) at around 4 CHF/month/number. Porting from swisscom numbers reasonably cheap. I ring IRL and D all the time, can listen to my mothers/mother-in-laws opinion of me for hours on end at virtually no cost to my good self.
Telephone S450IP from Siemens , 200 odd CHF from Conrad. Excellent phone, apart from the power management. additional units cost significantly less.
Apparently Pattons M-ATA works well in connecting analog faxes to VoIP, am ordering from the US (79 usd as opposed to 132CHF wo VAT) so will be able to tell later.
It's been some time since this thread was started. So for those of you who have used VoIP/SIP for a long time: how happy are you with it, and what would you have done earlier with what you know now?
At the moment, I'm looking for something for my new home in Lörrach (just over the German border from Basel) for a replacement for my normal phone, to which I would like to set up additional Swiss and Aussie phone numbers. There are a few promising options out there that involve using a computer (eg. Fritz!Box), but I'm after something that does not use a computer.
Skype has its uses sometimes, and with its dedicated phones it sounds interesting but with the recent problems it has had, it does not appear to be reliable enough to be the total replacement to a normal phone that I am looking for.