First let’s start with the basic- are you a good VOIP candidate?  What are the VOIP service requirements?  Despite what all of the marketing hype from all of the VOIP carriers, VOIP phone service is not for everyone.  Here are a couple of things that you need to keep in mind before switching to VOIP:

     1) Do you have high-speed internet connection at home that will support VOIP (e.g. a cable modem or DSL)?  This is important as VOIP will only work well over a high-speed connection and NOT dial-up.  If you don’t already have a high-speed internet connection at home, you will need to get one in order to use VOIP service.  Mr. Thrifty recommends against getting a high-speed internet connection if you are only going to use it for VOIP service. Save your money and stick with plain old telephone service from your local bell company.

     2) Test your internet connection for VOIP.  A great, FREE (Mr. Thrifty likes free) way to test to see if your internet connection will work with VOIP is www.testyourvoip.com.  A simple test will give you insight to see how well your VOIP service will work.

     3) Can you live with the periodic service outages of VOIP?  This is another dirty secret in the world of VOIP service- the service goes down a LOT more than your traditional home telephone service.  It makes sense when you think about it- go back through your memory and recall all of the times that you internet connection or power goes down.  In each case, your VOIP service would go down as well.  As such, VOIP may be ok if you are just planning on talking to your grandma periodically but not if you are running a hospital.

     4) Are you semi-technical?  Even though VOIP has come a long way over the past couple of years, you still need to feel pretty comfortable with technology in order to use VOIP- especially if something should go wrong.  Do you feel comfortable configuring and setting up a router?  Do you even know what a router is?  Do you know what an IP address is?  Do you know your home address?  If you answered no to any of these questions, VOIP may not be the way for you to go.