# VOIP Phone



## NK87230 (16 Dec 2012)

Hi, 

We are currently trying to get Sky Multiroom(in time for Christmas) and Sky have told us that we need a working landline in the house to have it installed.
However, when we rang UPC (we have a bundle package of home phone and broadband with them, although we have no use for a landline so we have no home phone), they told us that we need to buy a VOIP Phone as an ordinary home telephone won't work. 

However, it is very hard to find a provider that sell these VOIP Phones and am wondering has anybody had the same issues or is there a workaround that can be found to solve the problem!!!!

Any advice would be welcome......


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## newirishman (16 Dec 2012)

I use UPC with the home phone / broadband package. Not sure what UPC is up to these days, but I use a bog-standard telephone with UPC. There is no need for a VoIP phone, just plug any old phone into the with "phone" marked connection on the UPC router.
Sky box works just fine with that connection as well.


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## dub_nerd (16 Dec 2012)

I would be carefuly before spending money on foot of this advice.

What Sky are saying is that you need a phone _line_, with a phone socket into which you can plug your Sky Box(es). You do not need a phone, as such, in the sense of a phone handset. In fact, be careful of certain VoIP DECT phones that do not provide any telephone socket at all (although you may not have any luck with _any_ VoIP phones as described below).

Sky require you to have a phone connection for multiroom for use with Sky Interactive and Pay Per View. You can get out of this requirement for a non-multiroom contract by paying a fee, but for some reason they require you to stay hooked up for multiroom (probably to make sure that it's not used to divert the multiple Sky cards to other locations).

The phone line you use has to support dial-up to a modem, which is essentially what the Sky box does at regular intervals. This generally works fine over an old Eircom copper wire analog phone line to your house. 

A VoIP phone line is one that connects over the internet, usually via a broadband connection. Often (but not always, hence my warning above) they provide an analog telephone adapter (ATA) that lets you plug in a regular analog telephone handset (or your Sky Box). HOWEVER, an ATA generally applies encoding/decoding including compression to the phone signal, which very often means that modem dial-up simply won't work.

I have no idea why UPC is telling you that you need a VoIP phone -- if you have a phone service from UPC, that's exactly what the phone socket in the back of your UPC router is -- an ATA connected to UPC's VoIP service. Some people have reported these working with Sky Boxes, many have not. But the same is going to be true of any VoIP setup -- you may have success and you may not, depending on vagaries of setup and VoIP provider. If you use a different ATA you will have to set up an account with a VoIP provider. If you're not very technically savvy and/or lucky, you may very well not get this working for your Sky Box. Also, as far as I know you need a phone line connection for _each_ multiroom box.

If you really want to try it, the simplest setup is a Cisco ATA which you can buy online for about 50 euro. However, if I was you, I would just accept that Sky multiroom without an old analog phone line is impossible or unreliable. If your box fails to successfully dial up Sky once a month they may charge you penalties, basically amounting to an additional Sky subscription for each box. Some Sky support people have advised that Sky does not work with VoIP. If you are able to get reliable non-conflicting advice, good luck to you.

As a matter of interest, if you have UPC already, why not get UPC multiroom?

EDIT: As newirishman says above, your best bet is actually to just try it with the UPC phone connection and see if it works. But bear in mind you will need to string cables around so that _each_ multiroom box can be plugged in, which may or may not be impossible.

Another thing that occurs to me is how stupid and self-defeating this is on Sky's part. Apart from losing them customers left right and centre, certain VoIP providers let you set your caller ID for phone calls, which means that you could easily take one of your multiroom boxes to your pub or holiday home in Spain and use it from there -- the very thing they are trying to prevent.


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## bluemac (16 Dec 2012)

I Use VOIP phones, I use Blueface.ie and freespeech both I have found good.

You need to buy yourself a linksis pap2 phone adapter any where from €20  on ebay, this gives you 2 phone sockets you plug it into your network and plug in your normal phone and off you go. 

Calls cost very little  my bills for my home/business phone went from €140 a month down to about €30 a month.. No line rental unless you want a local phone number.  if you dont call on it it will cost you nothing

can be some quality issues but 90% of the time its great,


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## dub_nerd (17 Dec 2012)

If you go the VoIP route and are interested in cheap calls I recommend poivy.com. Been using them for years (might have heard of them here, in fact). They are some strange German or Swiss outfit (who operate dozens of similar VoIP services -- Google "Betamax prices" to see a list of rates for all their services). They have non-existent customer service, but if you can get it working it's ultracheap. Almost all calls free, other than mobile calls (at 9c/min to Ireland, cheaper to other countries). I got my bill down from a couple of hundred a month (lots of UK landline calls) to a tenner. Nowadays, it's more like a fiver. I use UPC's phone service just to have an incoming number, but don't actually make any outgoing calls on them. I use a Siemens Gigaset VoIP phone to have multiple handsets with simultaneous outgoing calls, and the incoming UPC line rings on them too. Never had voice quality issues, over either Eircom or UPC broadband. I use the same service over Digiweb satellite broadband from another location, no problem. (Fixed wireless or cellular broadband have been problematic though).


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## Wexfordman (9 Jan 2013)

I have fixed wireless and have been using voip for years with no problem, its very dependent on your provider. I am surprosed to see it working well over sattelite bb though Dubnerd.

With regards the use of an ATA for sky, I would concur with what dub said, in fact I've tried it and it does not work.!


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## dub_nerd (10 Jan 2013)

I'm using the KA-band satellite that went live in 2011 (resold through Digiweb). The earlier KU-band which I had a few years previously never managed to do VoIP, but KA-band seems to manage fine. Nobody more surprised than myself. There is the slight amount of delay that you would expect on a satellite connection, but I find it unproblematic.

I had fixed wireless in between for a miserable couple of years -- VoIP never worked, but then neither did much else. As Wexfordman says, I think the fixed wireless experience is very variable.


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## paulcoade (11 Jan 2013)

NK87230 ... If you have the home phone and broadband bundle from upc then there should be no problem getting sky multiroom . You have a working landline in the house ! 

When sky come to install your multiroom box they will put a splitter on to your upc phone port on the modem and run a phone extension cable to the box they are installing . 

Also if your upc modem is beside your main tv you can plug in the Internet cable to your sky box to view all the sky "on demand " content ( provided your sky box is compatible)

You do not need a phone handset unless you want to make or receive calls . Most cordless phones you buy in ireland are compatible with upc ( they have a list on the website upc.ie as far as I know).


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