IP Telephony & Marykirk.com

Today, using my marykirk.com network, I wanted to see how hard it would be to start using an IP based telephone service, instead of my BT based landline. 

Being a bit of a geek (No, really!), we have a Siemens Gigaset N300A based home telephone system. It's a wee black box that sits in our house, connected to a phone line and to the local network. Up until now, it's just been a phone system connected to our BT landline. We have five portable handsets scattered around the house, and its a pretty good, stable phone system all by itself. Here's a link to the base station - any siemens DECT handset will work. We have the nice colour ones.

So then I looked for a UK based VOIP telephony provider. One who could migrate our BT landline number if we wanted. I found VoipFone.co.uk. They offered a free signup, so I did that, and within a minute, got account login details. 

Using this guide, I then got my Gigaset telephone base station to register with VoipFone - and it all worked. In under 10 minutes! With no changes to the network. My BT landline still works - it takes a couple of weeks to migrate the number. I'll start that process once I'm happy with the service, and keep you all posted.  

Remember, this is my experience with this provider. You may have different telephone kit, or may want to use PC or Mac based Softphone software - your mileage may vary.