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VoIP for the Masses!

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the until-the-phone-bullies-arrive dept.

SkywalkerOS8 writes: "Vonage has begun offering Voice-over-IP(VoIP) service to residential broadband users. I've had the service since Friday and the quality is indistinguishable from a regular phone line. It's only $20/month for 500 minutes or $40/month for unlimited service. They include Cisco equipment, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Caller ID and Voicemail (which you can check online) in the service price. You can read more about it in this article in Time. It works fine through my Linux NAT firewall/router and my monthly phone budget has now dropped from $60+ to $20."

1 of 464 comments (clear)

  1. Speaking from experience... by sethadam1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    I work for a large US Naval organization and we've had a large VoIP solution in place for over a year (I believe it's the largest commercial VoIP rollout through Cisco so far...ever). The phones are great, they offer plenty of cool features that make them "really cool" and they are cheap to run (save the bandwidth costs). They are eseentially little routers - they use Cat6 twisted pair and can even run XML scripts. It's also nice to have your voice mail delivered to your e-mailbox instead of an answering machine.

    My question is, with the low service reliability of broadband (mine needs a reboot once a week or two and it goes down every few months for a few hours), what will you do when your phone lines go out for 4 hours on a Sunday for a small "service problem?"

    My take: it's too early for residential VoIP. Adam