Irish VoIP provider

BendiBus

Does anyone know anything about this company?

www.voipirl.ie

tomk

Never heard of them.

From their website, they appear to be a CPS service provider, and a DSL provider (presumably another €ircon reseller?), as well as proper two-way VOIP, unlike other recent offerings. I've sent them a mail to ask if they will be dealing with domestic users, as the accent seems to be on corporates.

Robxxx7

I have also sent them a mail earlier this morning..no reply as yet... but from my reading they do offer home cps... the rates look pretty competitive, just wait to see what they come back with..

Can anyone else advise of any other decent CPS offerings in Ireland. For example decent rate Local/National and calls to the UK ?

tomk

Yeah, home CPS is there - I'd be interested in home VOIP. I haven't had a reply yet either.

Re other CPS providers - EsatBT (on bus shelters everywhere at the moment), UTV (good deals in combo with their internet offerings, Vartec (good international rates), to name three.

tomk

Email from VoIPIrl.ie today:

Thanks for your inquiry.

Yes, we will be offering VoIP to residential customers in a couple of
months. At the moment, we are presently providing this service to
corporate and high volume telephone users such as call centres and will
be extending this to residential users. To use the service, you need a
good internet connection, preferably DSL, and would need to buy a small
gateway into which you plug a telephone. That's it, and you can then
call anywhere in the world at hugely reduced rates, or call another
internet-connected phone free of charge.

So I've sent off a few supplementary questions. Anything I get, I'll post here.

shoegirl

If you're spending more than 25 a month, EsatBT have great rates, but no good if you don't spend that much.

Vartec if you don't make local/national calls but make lots of international ones. 6c a minute for international and 3c a minute for national - good deal for a business user I think, or if you're from abroad and calling home.

Directdialtele.com or Euphony if you're a small spender - DDT charge the same for local/national calls, but are dearer for mobiles. Euphony let you have 3000 minutes of local and national calls for €5 a month - well the first 10 minutes. They are marginally more expensive for evening national calls 2.5c a minute against DDT's 1.26c.

Perlico if you want a balance between mobile, national/local and international rates.
They have very balanced rates for an all round user

tomk

Here's another one - Clear Solutions. Just saw their ad in the DART station this morning - haven't compared their rates.

Interesting quote from the "Future" section of their site:

As deregulation becomes more prominant in the Irish market place, Clear Solutions will add as many products to our portfolio as possible, so as to become a broker for all utilities. Electricity will be deregulated this year which will be followed by Gas, and we will be offering these services at a discounted price in comparison to the companies which currently have a monopoly on the market. The aim is to place all utilities on a single monthly/bi-monthly bill, not only saving the customer money on each product but also reducing stress, time and paperwork.

We also hope to have the line rental charge currently paid to Eircom appear on our bill, as soon as it is available at a reasonable price.

shoegirl

Check out www.comreg.ie - there's stuff on the line rental issue almost on a daily basis as the deadline for making single billing available approaches.

The latest is that comreg are forcing the "goodbye fee" for €ircom down from €24 per customer to €9.62. Thats great news.

Sarsfield

tomk, did you ask them if it will be possible to receive calls from a regular phone. In other words, will a VoIP phone service have a regular phone number?

I'd love to get rid of my phone line altogether and get wireless broadband with VoIP for phonecalls.

tomk

That was one of my questions, Sarsfield - no reply yet, though. I'm looking at this as you are - although I currently have UTV DSL, I'm expecting wireless services in the next few months, and I would love to be able to call €ircon and get my line disconnected - forever.

JTMan

Originally posted by Robxxx7

Can anyone else advise of any other decent CPS offerings in Ireland.

A full list of CPS providers is here
http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/cg05.pdf

Does a decent comparison chart of the 27 CPS operators exist?

darraghrogan

voipirl.com rang me back a day or two after me mailing them.

Man was very helpful, explaining all the issues. i had half an idea how voip worked but then he cleared it right up.

it seems there is no porting mechanism so you are simply assigned a new 01 number.

You can't set up a call hunting group ie hold on to your inital advetised phone number and then hunt it onto your voip numbers...bummer.

Aparently this is all down to ComReg not keeping up with technology?

Theres no rental as such - you just have to buy a gateway box. Anyone know who manufactures them? Or else you can use your voip enables pabx or software on your pc.

Voipirl recommend a ping of less than 150ms to their server for a seamless conversation - I forgot to ask about required bandwidth. Eitherway our netsource adsl connection got 40ms to their web server - grand

Darragh

eth0_

Originally posted by darraghrogan


Theres no rental as such - you just have to buy a gateway box. Anyone know who manufactures them? Or else you can use your voip enables pabx or software on your pc.

Cisco ATA 186/188 is what BT use for their home VOIP in the UK.
Seems pretty popular as they've taken all our stock in the UK I think

echomadman

Theres no rental as such - you just have to buy a gateway box. Anyone know who manufactures them? Or else you can use your voip enables pabx or software on your pc.

I have four two port ones lying around, i must sell them,

anyway

Voipirl recommend a ping of less than 150ms to their server for a seamless conversation - I forgot to ask about required bandwidth. Eitherway our netsource adsl connection got 40ms to their web server - grand

VOIP uses very little bandwidth unless you opt for one of the really high quality codecs,
G.723.1 uses 5.3/6Kb,
G.729A uses 8Kb
G.711 uses 64Kb
all the above come in a bit higher when you take ip overheads into account but using either if the lower codecs will be fine once you have any decent internet connection
thats up and down naturally enough, unless you do all the talking

darraghrogan

whats the retail price on one of those cisco gateway boxes?

tomk

Originally posted by darraghrogan
it seems there is no porting mechanism so you are simply assigned a new 01 number.

You can't set up a call hunting group ie hold on to your inital advetised phone number and then hunt it onto your voip numbers...bummer.

Aparently this is all down to ComReg not keeping up with technology?

Did he know, or have an opinion about, whether porting is under consideration? It must be obvious to him that he won't get much business if people have to change their numbers to sign up.

eth0_

Originally posted by darraghrogan
whats the retail price on one of those cisco gateway boxes?

ATA186 is around €133 retail....so ephone.ie are doing a good deal on it, they sell it for €120

tomk

Re number portability and other things for VoIP Ireland, I just got the following mail from them, in response to some earlier questions:

1. Our system will handle incoming and outgoing calls in a completely
transparent manner, and offers all the normal call features such as call
forwarding, call waiting etc.

2. Our VoIP service only needs a good internet connection (which in
practice means DSL), but it doesn't matter who is providing the DSL
service.

3. We're just finalising costings for the residential service and I can
let you know what they will be shortly. They'll also be published on our
website (www.voipirl.ie).

4. The question of using the same telephone number that you already have
is slightly complex and one that we are in discussion with ComReg.
Because VoIP telephone numbers are essentially non-geographic (i.e. not
tied to a physical location) but your landline number is geographic,
ComReg have not yet decided how to handle this number portability.

We hope to get this resolved shortly, but in the meantime we can provide
new numbers for VoIP users. Having two phone numbers may not, in fact,
be such a bad thing. Most DSL gets delivered over your landline, so
there is no saving in line rental if you go VoIP (there is, of course,
big savings on call charges). So what some clients elect to do is retain
their existing landline phone for incoming calls (and so do not have to
re-advertise) and use VoIP for their outgoing calls. The VoIP phone is
also available to take incoming calls, and both phones can be used
simultaneously, so you get two phone lines into your home.

I'll be keeping an eye on this.....

darraghrogan

But theres no call hunting mechanism.

Someone rings your advertised number, and if its busy, it doesnt hunt onto your voip number

Darragh

tomk

My interpretation of this section -

Because VoIP telephone numbers are essentially non-geographic (i.e. not
tied to a physical location) but your landline number is geographic,
ComReg have not yet decided how to handle this number portability.

We hope to get this resolved shortly, but in the meantime we can provide
new numbers for VoIP users.

- is that they are not intending to provide hunting. They are going to wait for a ComReg decision on portability of existing numbers.

You could always ask them yourself.

Cuauhtemoc

So with an Esat unbundled Dsl line you'd effectively have phone line with no line rental???
Would that be right?

tomk

Yes indeed - also possible with wireless BB.

SkepticOne

You should be able to get several VoIP lines over a decent BB connection. Each uses about 17.5k bandwidth.

Over contended BB connections, you would need to check how low the bandwidth goes during busy periods, though.

iwb

On the bandwidth issue, I use a Cisco Softphone to connect to a switch in North America over Eircom Solo. First of all, even using the low bandwidth setting, it seems to use around 50kbps on the uplink. I have tried it on dialup just for fun and it wasn't any.
Another thing to point out is that a year ago, I could pretty much call any time of day or night and not get problems. These days, it is a waste of time calling at certain times of the day as the contention is becoming an issue in Bray I guess. If it is like this on a 24:1 service, it will only be worse on the 48:1.
BTW, a pet peeve of mine, the whole area of always on has become misnomered to death. First of all, broadband these days almost seems to mean DSL. Also, idiots are coming up with satellite DSL packages and wireless DSL and so on. This gives me the sh1ts. DSL only refers to copper wire, period!!!!!

SkepticOne

Originally posted by iwb
On the bandwidth issue, I use a Cisco Softphone to connect to a switch in North America over Eircom Solo. First of all, even using the low bandwidth setting, it seems to use around 50kbps on the uplink.

This seems very high. Is it possible to switch codecs with this phone?

iwb

I know it sounds high. There was a setting for low bandwidth codec which I enabled. That was when I measured the 50kbps.
Perhaps some of the bandwidth being measured was the VPN. I'm not sure.