Using Skype as a replacement for a land line
Posted April 4th, 2009 by Nazmul
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I’ve been running my own business for a while and have been paying a lot of money per month for a land line. I have a few employees and have cell phones for all of us, and don’t have unlimited voice plans, we have shared minutes, and unlimited data plans for each of us. I don’t like to use mobile phones as the primary phone communication method, simply because of unreliable and choppy service, and even when service is good, sound quality is lacking, when compared to a landline. Having crappy phone lines gives businesses a cheap feel in my opinion, which is why I ended up spending a lot of money keeping a land line. I used to pay over $50 per month for a land line for the business, and the mobile phones end up costing about $60/70 per person (with unlimited data plan). So I was looking for a better and cheaper solution to having a land line.
I evaluated Vonage for a little while, but was not happy with their service, and they were quite expensive. So I looked at Skype In/Out as a replacement for my land line. In short, it works great, and in this review I will cover the details of the service and what you can expect if you use it.
SkypeIn/Out
Skype is free for use if you make skype to skype calls. This is great for videoconferencing or free calling between people that have skype and are already in your address book. However, I was interested in using it as a phone replacement, not just for P2P skype calls. In order to be able to make calls and receive calls you have to get SkypeIn and SkypeOut. Here are more details on this. It ends up costing about $60 USD for 1 year of phone service, and you can pick your own phone number, with area code that you like. So the price is great! This is much cheaper than getting a landline of course. Once you get a number, you can also change it if you don’t like it at any time, which is pretty cool. Caller ID, voicemail, and call forwarding are provided as well as part of the service, which is wonderful as well. Here are more details on these features:
Your own phone number
You can select the area code that you are interested in. You can also pick your own phone number. This phone number will show up as Caller ID when you call someone. Also, when someone calls you using your Skype number, their Caller ID will show up as well. I’ve found that Caller ID doesn’t always work reliably; there are many instances where I get incoming phone calls and Skype can’t tell who’s calling, and vice versa (I will call someone using SkypeOut and they won’t see my number).
Needless to say that you must be logged into Skype to be able to receive calls on your number; if you’re not logged in, then the call will go straight to voicemail (or you can setup call forwarding). One interesting thing about Skype is that if you’re logged in on multiple machines, you will get the option to answer the phone on all of those machines! This is not something that you can get from a traditional land line or a mobile phone. So you can have an office number that rings at the laptops/desktops/skype phones of all your employees. I find this useful for use by myself, since I have a lot of machines and tend to move around between them at different times of the day. Needless to say, when you’re not at your office or home and are at a coffee shop and want to bring your office line with you, just login to Skype and your laptop becomes a phone line over Wifi. Voice call quality is very good even over Wifi, and it’s just crystal clear over a high speed broadband connection (wired). Now if you have any Skype phones on your Wifi network, you don’t even need to run Skype on a laptop/desktop, since you will have a dedicated handset for the phone number.
Voicemail
You can record a voicemail message using Skype, and define the delay before which your incoming calls goes to voicemail. There are lots of options you can set here as can be seen here:
There are some issues with this feature though. If you have the Skype app running on more than one machine and you change these options on one of them, then there are some issues with these setting getting propagated to the other sessions. Let’s say that you want to change this default delay (in seconds) to something lower because you are in a meeting right now, then this setting will have some issues propagating to the other machine that’s also logged in at the same time. Also, this setting is shared with the call forwarding, so this is just plain confusing! So if you enable call forwarding, and change this delay, then it will affect your voicemail settings as well.
Call forwarding
You can forward the incoming call to a land line or mobile phone at no charge (except for the minutes or whatever it costs on the line the call is being forwarded to).
Again, keep in mind that the delay you set here also affects voicemail, which is confusing. Also, keesp in mind that this setting might not be propagated as you might expect if you have multiple machines logged into the Skype app at the same time. So after you change these settings, be sure to check to see that they are what they should be on each machine that you’re logged into Skype on.
Peripherals/Accessories
Although a laptop or desktop that has decent speakers and microphone array and/or a web cam should suffice as a good phone, there are some peripherals you should get to ensure that call quality is great. One must-have accessory is a USB microphone. Most laptops have built in webcams and microphones, however, they are not all the same quality; so to make sure that the people who you are speaking with using SkypeIn/Out can actually hear what you’re saying, you should get a good external mic. The Logitech is a great device, and works fantastically. The mic is so good that it acts as a fantastic speaker phone if you have multiple people on the call.
I also use a Bluetooth headset with my laptop when I’m out and about, and I find this Plantronics 855 stereo headset to be great. You don’t have to use an external headset if you are in an environment where you can pipe the conversation out of your laptop/desktop speakers. If you need privacy, get a headset.
Final thoughts
I’m personally very happy with SkypeIn/Out service, when I’m using a high quality broadband connection (wired preferably), although it works reasonably well over a Wifi G connection. For best results, use a high speed wired network connection, and a good external mic. The only part of the service I’m not happy with is the Caller ID not working reliably, and the delay settings shared between voicemail and call forwarding, and the issues with propagating these settings changes amongst more than one Skype app that you can log into.
If you have any comments/questions, let me know.
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