Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) has been around for a few years now and is used in many call centres and homes as a secondary line. There is no denying that it is incredibly cheap, but is it as good as a Tel-co phone line direct to your house ?

I have had Engin VOIP as the main line in my house for a year now. I got married and moved out of home. The new house already had a cable internet connection so I decided to stick with it. Signing up to the Engin VOIP service meant I would not have to rent a phone line for phone or internet services. This seemed like the ideal solution, embracing new technology to save myself money.

This article will explain my experience with the Engin service in Australia and show you the positives and negatives of using VOIP services.

I do not have experience with other VOIP services. All I have used is Engin, other companies may be better or worse. I am based in Australia so this article is relevant to Australians. There is a good chance that in other countries, companies have invested more money into VOIP.

I am using Engin Voice Box Series 1. Other VOIP products may offer a better quality call. Ensure to include the cost of the voice box into your decision to go with VOIP.

Reasons: There are many reasons why I wanted to give Engin a go. It was a risk as it was fairly new but they offered so much more than a regular phone company for the price. I have listed some of them below.

• Extremely cheap local calls
• Extremely cheap national calls
• No land-line cost
• Free extra services such as called ID which regular Tel-cos charge extra for
• New technology, I always like to tinker
• Engin was being advertised on radio and TV
• Cable would provide plenty of bandwidth to allow for voice calls.

Installation: Installation was quick and easy. All I had to do was connect the voice box up to my router and my phone system. I also bought a set of Uniden WDECT phones and placed them around my house so there is cordless phone in each room of my house and attached it to the Engin Box.

I rang Engin with my details and registered myself with the service. The whole process was quick and easy and the next day it was up and running.

The first week was a bit shaky. The phone would continually drop out and the call quality was not great. Each morning I would have to check the phone for a dial tone to ensure I could still receive calls. After the first week, things settled down and the phone would rarely disconnect itself. To reconnect the voice-box again I would have to disconnect and reconnect power to both the router and the voice box.

The Bills: These are great. I pay $9.95 a month to access the service and 10c for each local and national call. Calling mobiles is also cheaper. Our household makes around 30 local/national calls a month, costing us $3. We also make around 10 mobile calls a month which costs us around $10 for 30 minutes of talk time.

All up, that’s around $25 for us monthly. We would have to pay around the $60 mark with a regular Tel-co.

Day to day use: At the start there was a minor noticeable sound delay in many of the phone calls and the call quality was not all that good. I could make sense of what the other person was saying, but it was nowhere near the call quality of a fixed line.

I was not happy with people at the other end saying that the phone line was crap, or saying they heard an echo. I wanted do something about this so I signed up as a Voiper user. This allowed me to play around with the settings inside the voice box. There was a cost to this as I would no longer get the same support offered to regular users. I had used their support prior to this but they were unable to help me get the quality of calls to where I wanted it to be so I felt like I had no support anyway. I was left to my own devices from now on and had to use web forums to learn what to change to get the most out of the system.

I changed the voice codec, testing each one to see what sounded better. I played with a few other settings also but the codec was the main one. The codec is the converter which changes your voice to a digital signal the computer world can understand.

The results were a little better after these changes. The dropouts still occured every so often and my wife and family were getting quite frustrated by it all. After 6 months I was borderline as to if we should get a proper phone line installed. The cost (approximately an extra $40 a month) helped me stick with Engin. This was a very bad time for Engin as calls were dropping out all over the shop.

I continued on with it, trying a different codec every couple of weeks. I don’t think the codec change is what has helped make it better though. I think the company itself has done some upgrades at its end. The phone line is now quite usable and it very rarely drops out. I asked my wife what she thought of it and she said “I suppose it’s alright”.

It is still not quite up to what a standard Tel-co company offers. When I started off using Engin, it was like calling overseas around 20 years ago. Now it is the equivalent to calling overseas 10 years ago.

Conclusion: I am using Engin as the only phone line to and from my house, we can also communicate through our mobile phones. For us, the money saved through using VOIP makes it worth sticking with the service. It is a trade off. The quality isn’t fantastic but it is usable and it should only get better with time.

Running a company and using your VOIP line as your only phone line may lose you customers. If the phone disconnects or isn’t of great quality, the customer may become frustrated and go somewhere else.

If you already have a regular Tel-co land-line, you may want to consider installing VOIP also as the cost of sending a fax through the system is cheap. The cost of calling national is cheap. With many of their voice boxes, you are able to send your current phone line into the box so that you can choose which system you send your calls out on. This is especially useful for calling emergency phone numbers.

If you have a power outage and you use VOIP, you will need to use your mobile phone as VOIP will not work.

I hope that this has given you a worthwhile understanding of what VOIP will be like for you. There is no doubt that VOIP is the future, but currently you will have to decide if the future is ready for you.

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