A fellow here at work and I were talking about VoIP phones. We have them at our place of business but neither he nor I have them at home.
He said he’d read about a fellow who obtained one because he traveled internationally a good bit and he was able to take his with him and use it in different countries as he traveled. I’ve not seen the article, but guessing he’s meaning that he just plugged it into the hotel’s high speed internet line and made his calls.
That just doesn’t sound right to me. It could be that it is, but I have DSL and can’t just hook my PC to someone else’s phone jack and expect it to work.
Any Dopers with VoIP phones? If you take it to my house and plug it into my DSL line or cable internet line will it work?
Looks like he’s right! Travel Globally I should have used a better search term.
I never really thought about it, but apparently so. I moved between two places in NY state and then across the entire country and just plugged my phone in at the new homes without doing anything else special. It was no different than plugging my laptop into the ethernet router.
To the OP, you’re thinking about it wrong. You said you have DSL but you can’t just plug your modem in anywhere and expect it to work. Think about it this way. You have a web browser and you can use that anywhere you have a internet connection. VoIP doesn’t care how it get’s on to the internet, as long as it gets there.
ETA, yes, I can take my onage phone to your house and use it to make and receive calls. It will also keep my number as well.
Actually in most hotels, you can do exactly that - plug your laptop in and it just works. Machines that are set up (as they are by default) to get their address and DNS info by DHCP will do that just fine.
For the most part, it’s just as others have said. VoIP will work anywhere you have internet access.
One wrinkle they haven’t worked out yet is with 911 service. If you call 911 on your VoIP phone it will go to the emergency services for your “home” address, wherever you are in the world.
At a hotel, you’re not directly interfacing with their internet connection, which might be cable, dsl, T1, whatever. You’re accessing their network which shares the internet connection from whatever source they use. You’re connecting via ethernet cable, not a phone line or a coax cable.
Another consideration in hotels is whether they filter the port that is used for VoIP. Although I once brought my Vonage router on trips, most eventually figured this out & blocked its usage.
I think I understand now. If “you” bring your VoIP phone to my house and plug it into my router, you’ll be able to make and receive calls. (Router stores logon ID and password), but if you plug it directly into my DSL modem you won’t be able to because my provider is expecting an ID that your VoIP phone won’t be able to provide. Is that generally correct?
When I travel and plug my work PC into a hotels high speed line, I sometimes get a notice that I need to enter a credit card to pay for access. I’m guessing that a VoIP phone, not a PC running soft phone software, would not be able to display this notice and I’d be out of luck. :dubious: