phone and internet question

[tom]

for any of you who know about this stuff, please help.

we are moving the shop in a couple months and we are currently on verizon fios for phone and internet. our new place does not have fios or cable available. DSL only. are considering Voip phones since the equipment is much less expensive and has way more usable features. but, and it's a big but, can a single dsl line handle Voip and internet use. they say all we can get is 768k upload. they also say we can not get 2 dsl lines but because we will occupy two units we may be able to get two dif dsl, one for phone and one for internet.

any ideas about how this could work?

[pipedwho]

The physical twisted pair copper wiring that was used on the regular phone system will carry both ADSL and voice traffic. The voice is run at baseband and the ADSL signal is modulated on the same wires far above the audio band. A cheap filter is used to stop one interfering with the other.

VOIP is handy as a supplementary service, but I'd strongly recommend that you keep your main incoming phone line as a standard voice service (shared with DSL on the same twisted copper pair). Only use VOIP for convenience for making cheaper outbound calls or video/audio chatting with various apps like FaceTime/Skype/etc. That way, if the internet 'goes down', you can still make and receive phone calls.

Sometimes the phone company only runs a single 8 pair or 4 pair cable to a premises. That means you may only get a single twisted pair per unit. But, if you can be allocated two separate pairs, then it is possible to get something call 'bonded pair ADSL'. Bonded DSL allows two separate DSL physical pairs to go into a single modem box at your end that mixes the traffic - effectively doubling the up and down speeds of the connection.

If you have two physical lines, then you get two separate voice numbers (whether or not you're paying for those to be useable as voice lines or just a single one as voice/DSL and the other as a slave DSL).

What I've described above is how the system works at the phone company. Sometimes the sales divisions don't understand it and have trouble selling it to you properly. Not being in the USA, I have no experience with Verizon, but the technology is the same.

One other thing worth noting is that for a while there were some companies that allowed multiplexing two phone numbers on the same physical twisted pair. This technology is dodgy and was used when only a single pair was available and a customer wanted more than one voice line. At its worst, this technique was used to share a single pair among two unrelated units (bad bad bad). If this is in place, then DSL can't be used on those lines. But, it sounds like it won't be a problem from what you've described.

So as long as you have two separate physical copper twisted pairs coming into your office, then you should be able to arrange to get bonded pair ADSL, along with one or two standard voice lines.

[pipedwho]

VOIP is just regular internet traffic and can be used whenever you have internet connectivity. It only used about 15kbps up and down per voice channel. Your routers should also prioritise the VOIP traffic so it always gets preference over general browsing and downloading.

[Pietro]

I have friends that have used voip in a situation like yours and their home phones were worthless...

Don't know all the technical whiz-bang-etry why, but they hated that service.