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VoIP
With Multiple Phones On One Connection
By Jack Spirko
 Just
about once a week I get an email that goes something like
this, "I just ordered Broadband phone
service from your website and it is working great. I
have a question though, how can I use VoIP with multiple
phones in my house. I want a phone in my kitchen, my
bedroom and one in the living room. Can you tell me
how to do this."
Generally
what these people are looking to accomplish is quite simple,
they want to be able to answer or make calls with their
phone line in several different areas of their home with out
going to where ever the computer is to pick up the
phone. There are a few ways to handle this. The
most simple is to just use a cordless phone. This
works great for many people indeed I do it myself with the
IP Phone I keep in my home office for business use.
Adding an IP line for only 19.95 from Packet8 was a simple
solution for me when I work out of my home and want to keep
business calls off my private line.
All I did was get a
simple cordless phone, plug it into my Packet8 Adapter Box
and now I can take my phone anywhere in the house. For
a single user with a single objective this is a great
solution but it does have some limitations. For
instance if I go upstairs I have to take my cordless hand
set with me and if I leave it somewhere then I have to run
to answer it or if left over night off of the base I end up
with a dead battery. Again since I am the only one who uses
this phone and it is for my home office this is a great
solution. I hear you though what you are looking to do
is have one phone say downstairs and one up stairs and
perhaps one in the kitchen.
 Well
there is a very simple and very low tech solution to
this. Just go out and purchase a cordless phone with
multiple handsets and like magic you end up with VoIP with
multiple phones. These cordless sets are generally
well under 100 dollars, they are easy to set up and
available just at just about any store that sells
telephones. Just a few days ago at Sam's Club I saw a
cordless phone set with four handsets for under a hundred
dollars. All you do with this type of phone set is
plug in the main unit with the master base at your broadband
phone adapter. You then put the extra handsets with
their chargers at any location you want them in your
home. They communicate with the base set and when
someone calls you all the handsets will ring or you can pick
up any of them to make a call. They also offer a real
advantage over conventional phones in that they only require
power at the locations of the handsets so you can put your
handsets anyplace you have an electrical plug and not worry
about a phone jack at all.
I would like to provide a few words of
advice on buying a cordless phone set for this type of
use. First if you have wireless gear in your home
computer network or plan to ever even some day may be put in a
wireless access point for computers in your home (plan for
it even if you think you won't) then make sure you buy a
cordless phone that operates at 5.8GHz (it will say so right
on the phone). The reason is that some wireless
network equipment operates at 2.4GHz and if you put a
cordless phone in your home at the same frequency you can
have interference between your wireless network and your
phone. I will be doing an article about this soon just
for now take my advice buy a 5.8GHz phone as the price
difference between the two options is so small anyway you
might as well get the higher frequency and the better
quality it provides.
Second
is if you are buying multiple hand sets buy as many
additional handsets as you need the day you buy the phone in
fact if you have the budget buy one more then you
need. Why you ask? Well, please consider when
you are purchasing a commodity product like a mass produced
phone set that the Wal-Marts, Best Buys and Circuit Cities
of the world sell, you have no way to know just how long that
set is going to stay for sale on the market. It is the
nature of anything you find on a department store shelf to
constantly be replaced with new versions as suppliers seek
to reduce costs and improve availability. So if you
buy a particular set today and decide next year you want to
expand it, there is a decent chance that your model will be
out of production.
Other then that just buy the set that
best fits your needs. Many of them come with answering
machines but of course you won't need one since just about
an VoIP Provider worth being in business gives away free
voice mail so don't pay extra for that feature. Take a
look at what is available and get the set that you like
best, make sure it is a 5.8GHz set then just take it home, plug it in and in
just a few minutes you can have your VoIP phone line in
every room of your home. If you happen to still be
looking for a broadband phone provider just visit our compare
plans page on this website to see a comparison of
the top providers available today.
- Jack Spirko
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