Small Business, Multiple Lines

We tried Voip 2x previously and switched back to our regular phone lines. i don't believe the providers were offering the correct solutions - we can't be the only office not able to use VOIP.

This is what we have - cable internet coming to a cable modem. This runs to a Netgear WGT624 wired/wireless modem. Connected to the modem - wired are 2) macs & 1) dell. Wireless connections are 1) mac 1) dell

We have 3 seperate phone lines - 2 used for voice one used as a dedicated fax line. We tried vonage and Att. Both companies had us reconfigure our network, adding a VOIP equipment and after spending many hours on the phone with them we never could make or receive calls but sporadically.

This business is located in our home and also supplies basic cable to our tv but we were told that didn't matter either. The space that the computers and phone lines are located in is 2500 sf.

Are we just not candidates for VOIP? the minute we say we have a mac the companies that we are speaking with respond with and "ooooooh" - are macs somehow not compaitable with VOIP? What am I missing?

Thanks
elle

Hi Elle

Welcome to voipuser.

Quote:

we never could make or receive calls but sporadically.

Voip should work and I believe there are mac clients, But to successfully use voip you need to make sure your network is upto the Job and you have avalible bandwidth for the calls.

what is the bandwidth of you cable connection ?

Ian

When I do a bandwith test it comes back with 1160.4 Kbps

Our provider - Comcast - advertises the speeds to be "Up to 6Mbps/384Kbps"

When we were having problems - the 2nd VOIP company At&t did some bandwidth tests to see if that was the problem but they thought it was not. At the time, we upgraded to the "Up to 8Mbps/768Kbps" package for almost a year with no noticeable difference in internet speed or with VOIP connectivity. The phone lines were mostly dead or the few calls we did get to receive were dropped. I don't think we ever got to actually make a call. This was over a 9 month period of time. Fortunately, we didn't try to transfer all our phones and still had 1 wired line to use.

Wonder if this may be an overactive DHCP or NAT problem within your providers system?

Does the phone loose registration with the provider with the same regularity?

Try resetting the registration interval on a softphone to about 5 minutes and see if that improves things.

We had 2 separate providers. I can't speak to consistancy with the issues because we never had phone service that actually worked with either the providers. Vonage provided a voip router (I don't remember what kind) and At&t provided a linksys router.

When we originally signed up for service and used the number they assigned - I remember making a few calls successfully. After they brought our numbers in from verizon , we never received good line connections.

We don't have any VOIP now - only landlines. I am trying to reseach what needs to happen to have VOIP at our location - successfully. With all the trouble this has been I'm not sure this is even possible ?