How to use Internet to make phone calls?

Tech Support
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We’d love some help with ideas!

Our mobile service is poor and our internet has just been upgraded to GB fiber. Our “land line” phone number is VOIP provided by ISP and with an adaptor (ATA they call it) connected to our ~7 year old cordless ATT phone. VOIP on the ATT is pretty good.

We also each have a 2020 SE iPhone. According to our ISP, there is no way to connect our phones to our internet and make better quality calls than the ones we make with the mobile cell service. They say that calls make our iPhones are totally dependent on the mobile’s signal strength - rarely more than 1 bar.

We are imagining using our laptops and internet to make phone calls. We know google voice exists. What other services/solutions can be set up on our computers to take advantage our great internet? And is there any way, we could use our landline number?

Thanks in advance!

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The ability to route voice calls over a WiFi connection is built-in to the iPhone (provided your cell carrier supports it).

My current apartment has just one bar of Verizon service, but with WiFi calling I have no issues making voice calls.

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I’m not 100% sure, but you might be able to use Skype to do this with your landline number.

Also, we have terrible cell carrier connectivity at home, but we got a mini cell tower from our provider and it’s completely solved the problem.

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+1 for WiFi calling.

What’s App is another option.

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your other option is to use other services to call other people without using a number e.g. Facetime Audio.

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Another option, albeit more complex, is to transfer your VOIP service to a Google Voice number.

The process is unfortunately a bit complex. You can import a cellular phone number to Google to become a Google Voice number; they charge $10 to do this. However, you cannot transfer a VOIP number from a cable internet provider to Google Voice. What you have to do is transfer the phone number to a cellular service (eg you get a cheap SIM card for an cell phone and transfer the number to a cellular service); then you wait for the transfer to be done and then import the number to Google Voice.

Once you have done that, there are various vendors that provide hardware that can connect to a Google Voice account and allow you to connect a standard telephone to them. Orbi is, I believe, once such vendor.

This sounds good, in theory, but in full disclosure this has been on my todo list for some time but I haven’t actually done the steps myself so I cannot guarantee it all works.

There are also cordless phone systems (I have one) that allow you to connect your cell phone to them, BUT again I have not tried anything like this.

I would propose that using WiFi calling from your cell phone if your cell provider allows it is the simplest solution.

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There are a ton of voip service providers. For my business I used phone.com. It sounds like Ring Central is way overkill for you and is hella expensive.