VoIP POTS Adapters
January 20th, 2012I’ve finally had it with Telecom’s criminal line rental fees. I’ve been testing a VoIP provider’s (2talk) softphone over my mobile broadband connections and it works fine. Using VoIP for our telephone service will save us at least NZ$50 per month.
Ok, so I need a POTS adapter. The Linksys SPA2102 is widely available in NZ and it definitely works with my VoIP provider. If you know a better box for the money, let me know. (The OBi110 seems pretty good, but I’m not sure if it would work with NZ POTS phones.)
Yeah Kevin, I dropped Telecome 2 years ago and went full on Skype. Interfacing the computer and my portable was a bit rascally.
I’ve heard of many people in the U.S. going to Skype full time, but does Skype offer local NZ phone numbers?
I didn’t think so, but if they do, I would like to test it out.
2talk let’s us move our local NZ number to their service.
Yes, Skype offers numbers in quite a few countries now. I’ve one in the U.S. and NZ. Cost is really cheap…like $30/yr. Also just subscribed to U.S. landline (and mobile) calls from NZ ..get this 520 minutes/month at a total cost of $60 A YEAR. Also have a subscription inside NZ, but most calls anywhere in world are 0.02 cents. I know I sound like an advertisement for Skype but I started with them 5 years ago and have been quite pleased. I laugh now because initially my staff were shocked to see 1 million people online. Now it’s common to see 25 million.
But no..you can’t get a local number from Skype. Ours is a (03) 669 number, out of Christchurch. So people calling you from your neighborhood will have to pay CHCH or AKL rates. Other great thing was no more telemarketers. Hurray!
I think the Linksys unit you linked is the one we use with our faxes at work. They seem to work pretty well. When we moved offices, we opted for VoIP phones for all the desks. Other than a few little bandwidth issues at first, everything has worked very well.