wi-fi IP phones

[mick]

This thread could also belong in the hardware forum, but anyway...

I'm trying to set up my parents house with VOIP so they can call all their travelling offspring for cheap. They are definitely non-tech savvy people, so I'd like to leave them set up with a VOIP phone that connects directly to the router rather than having to have a pc switched on all the time.

So a few questions:
1. Is it much more hassle/expense to use hardware that connects directly to the router instead of to a pc?
2. Can you get an analogue phone adapter that connects direct to router, or must it connect to pc? (i.e. am I better off buying an IP phone than an adapter?)
3. Are wi-fi IP phones reliable and can they work without requiring the pc to be switched on?
4. Where's the best place to buy a wi-fi IP phone?

I'm probably asking for trouble just arriving and posting all these questions, but any advice would be much appreciated.

[Al.]

The easiest and most common setup is:

Modem > Router/ATA > Dect phones

The router/ATA you can buy yourself, or buy preconfigured from blueface
The Dect phones are the standard type you'd use with a conventional phone line. So you can have multiple handsets and roam around the house and garden and chatter of cheap.
This is the setup I have.

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by mick

3. Are wi-fi IP phones reliable and can they work without requiring the pc to be switched on?
4. Where's the best place to buy a wi-fi IP phone?.

Al answered the other questions but in relation to the WiFi ones you've posed I would say definitely stay away from them at this stage.

Two reasons for that. The first one is they are far from easy to set up and use especially if you're changing access points if you move around with it. So you do need to be fairly technical or at least prapared to play around with it a bit to get it working.

The second reason is the ones I have tried out have not been great. We haven't bought a new one to test for about 6 months but the two we bought and tested 6 months ago were fairly poor with noticebale audio chop even when getting a clean WiFi signal.

Oh and a third reason not to is that they're twice as expensive as an ATA/Dect handset combination.