Landline? No thanks!

What with the recent improvement of the whole of our area's broadband speeds, I decided to shop around and see if I could get a faster connection for less money from a different provider.? There is a lot of talk about 'fibre rollout' but living here, in rural Ireland there is no fear that I will be breaking any speed records! Previously my ADSL line supported a maximum of 5.5MB and I was signed up on Vodafone's at home 7MB which included home telephone + broadband for €45 per month + calls.

Since 2009 I had been a happy Vodafone customer, yes.. I did just say that!! (although I did have to ditched their rather useless white modem after the first week or so). Anyway to cut a long story short, I have recently switched my broadband provider (switched to Purely Broadband - 100MB from Pure Telecom for €39 per month in January 2016, however my line only had a slight upgrade and now supports 10MB, so I've doubled my speed for €6 less each month) and by doing so, I decided to ditch the house landline as well, why's that you ask?

After replacing the rather useless white Vodafone modem/router I picked up a replacement router from eBay called a Draytek Vigor 2910VG, I remember that I only paid around £20 including postage which was an absolute steal. These things are fantastic and have really opened my eyes to the company Draytek. Apart from numerous features which exist in this Draytek router the feature that I am interest in talking to you today is the SIP VOIP and the two RJ11 connectors on the rear of the router.

You plug an older analogue type phone into one of the RJ11 sockets, then configure the router with your details and guess what? You have a working landline phone! OK so maybe I glossed over the configuration a bit briefly but it really can be that easy. In fact the main thing that I struggled with wasn't setting up the details in the router, but was in fact, getting hold of a local regional phone number. Initially I had a UK phone number (free from SIPGate) which was fine, if not a little confusing for the locals when I was giving them a UK phone number! So how do you get a local regional phone number then?

IrishVOIP.com helped me out with this, but it's not exactly free*. I'll explain, you pay IrishVOIP €5.00 per month and they top up your landline's calling credit. Actually it's €6.15 with the VAT included, and they give you a free* local regional phone number. The call credit can be topped up if you use it all and it rolls over if you don't. Call rates are cheaper as well, here's a quick preview of the prices:

Irish landlines €0.02 per minute,

Irish mobiles €0.05 per minute,

Irish VOIP €0.00 per minute.

UK landlines €0.006 per minute,

UK mobiles (between) €0.017 - €0.172

You can see all of their call tariff here but the best VOIP feature of the Draytek router? You can actually load up 6 individual sets of SIP VOIP details (i.e 6 different companies) and therefore get the best deal available in terms of lower or even free calls. As I previously said earlier, initially I was with SIPGate and their call tariff was slightly different;

Irish landlines £0.019

Irish mobiles £0.14

UK landlines £0.019

UK mobiles £0.099

SIP 2 SIP calls £0.00

Of course I can switch back to SIPGate at anytime, their details are in my router from before. You can view SIPGates complete tariff here.

So hopefully I have given all of you something to think about? I know that I'm not actually saving any money on the face of it but then I also won't be getting any huge bills from Vodafone in terms of additional phone calls. Additionally my call quality has increased and my internet is also double the speed. If Eir decide to make any further improvements then my internet could get as fast as 100MB without any additional cost from PureTelecom. All of which is good news and I'm certainly a happy customer and wanted to share all of this news with you.

Oh, one quick point which I feel I must point out even it it is slightly negative, as I mentioned above "If Eir decide to make any further improvements then my internet could get as fast as 100MB without any additional cost from PureTelecom" although unfortunately my Draytek Vigor 2910VG would not be able to provide me with any WAN speeds greater than 25-30MB. It is however very unlikely that Eir would or could even make these improvements, but should they go and do the unthinkable! I would have to purchase a newer Draytek router which would provide me with a much faster WAN connection something which I will look into if I ever have the need!