There’s a lot of hype these days surrounding Internet-based voice communications (VoIP) replacing traditional telephone service. Most of this revolves around companies such as Vonage who coin themselves as the ‘Broadband Phone Company’. So what about those of us who don’t have a broadband connection? Just because you don’t have high speed Internet, doesn’t mean that you can’t save a fortune by using VoIP for your long-distance calls. Whilst a broadband connection will usually result in more consistent VoIP call quality, comparable results can be achieved using a dial-up connection provided some simple guidelines are followed.

Shop Around

Not all VoIP service providers support dial-up users. Companies such as Vonage bill themselves as alternatives to traditional telephone service and shy away from the dial-up community (who are tied to those ‘traditional’ networks to access the Internet). Furthermore, some service providers only support dial-up above a certain speed (e.g., 56Kbp). Two companies whose VoIP softphone applications work well over low speed connections include Callserve and Go2Call.

‘Free-up’ your System Resources

In order to ensure the highest call quality, close programs that are running in the ‘background’. For Windows users, these applications can be seen in the… [Dial Up VoIP]