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NYT Reviews VoIP: Vonage, Packet8, VoicePulse
securitas writes "The New York Times Technology section reviews VoIP services Vonage, VoicePulse and Packet8. A second article rounds up the competition including VoIP start-ups, cable companies and traditional telcos. The review primarily focuses on Vonage and it's an enlightening review particularly because the reporter isn't a techie. Most interesting is the comment from Vonage's CEO Jeffrey Citron: 'We're not that happy with the level of service today.' The outcome of the review and CEO's comments really do indicate that VoIP is still at the bleeding edge - and not for the average consumer - but the technology is maturing quickly. It will be interesting to see if the telcos do any better with their QoS (quality of service) - which has historically been a critical differentiating factor and competitive advantage - when they introduce their VoIP services in 2004."
People in the UK can now get VoIP from BT with BT Broadband Voice. They are aiming it at people with cable connections. The odd thing is that they recommend still keeping a normal phone line.
It's quite strange to see BT doing something before anyone else.
Steve.
A latent existence
As a Vonage subscriber, I'd like to mention my experiences thus far.
Excellent!
Although, the service did take over a month to get turned on, now that it is, I haven't had any problems. The one or two occasions that the Vonage VM had to pick up, was while I was dinking with my router, and was blocking everything by mistake. I'm still working on getting QoS to work on my side, and thus improve performance, but so far the only drawk back is that I cannot be uploading at the same time, else it sounds muted when not speaking.
I can download all day long and still recieve excellent quality voice.
The other drawback I see, however, is the ATA. I would perfer a better way to incorporate it into the existing phone wiring, but no good. I've since purhcased a dual handset cordless phone, and no problems since, going forward, it'll be easy to take with me whereever I go. Just get the broadband access connection, and walla.
Thinking ahead, I'm sure I can incorporate it into my home phone wiring, as soon as I get a home, currently living in an apartment, but again, minor.
my 2 cents.
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
This is presumably for when your granny visits, or some other technologically-challenged family members/friends :-)
I especially like that USB 'traditional phone' piece of kit that just lets you pretend you're on a normal line while sending everything over VOIP (!)
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
A while back the FCC made a decision that has removed the availability of unbundled DSL service. This is one of many reason's why. Of course I understand the Baby Bell's position, you want me to not charge for the line? I say that they get to wholesale it, and frankly that the Baby Bell's should be like power companies, you get a contract to maintain the lines for X years, you get paid Y dollars, and have to maintain Z services. On top of that you get to call them "your" lines, except you have to wholesale (wholesale purchases get to pay taxes just like you do, but they just get a circuit.) At that point states/localaties get to choose competition.
If I remember correctly this is the way Power lines/companies are handled in Chicago, but I could be wrong.
Of course I now live where DSL can't get to, so I have to live with cable until I can convince someone to startup a Wireless broadband company on one of the many high tranmission towers in the area. That or I convince everyone in the neighborhood to by in, and I set it up.
I've been using Vonage as my family's primary line since April. It's not perfect, but it's better than a cell line. Back in the SFBA I was using it over a SBC DSL line; I found that it cost about the same to use Vonage and keep a $80/mo DSL line as it did to use a traditional PSTN line and keep a cheaper DSL line. I think we saved maybe $5 or $10/mo, chump change. But where it really came in useful is last month, when we moved to Wellington New Zealand. We've been using it since our DSL went live down here, and as far as the yankees can tell we're calling from the SFBA. Even with the outrageous prices of DSL (Telcom NZ is a monoploy and they really love to ream it to you) it's still cheaper than international long distance. There's a slight bit more latency than PSTN, but not enough to matter, given the significant savings. Another nice thing is being able to dial US 800 numbers. It's a real bitch from an international line, but on Vonage it's just like I'm callng from SF. And of course when folks call us they pay domestic long distance and ring a phone in Wellington. Good stuff for the ex-pat.
ehintz
Vonage has sold out and are owned partially by the Canopy Group. We all know the Canopy Group is also involved in the whole SCO mess. If you use Vonage, you're supporting Canopy (some money goes to them) and therefore are supporting SCO.
Hilarious! I did the exact same thing as the journalist who wrote the NYT piece: called my mom. My nickname for her is Inspector Gadget because she still gets a kick out of picking up the phone and saying "Hello (insert caller's name)" after having peeked at her caller ID box. She refuses, however, to get an answering machine. ("What the heck do I want one of those things for?")
Like cooking rattlesnake for someone and letting them think it's chicken 'til after they've eaten and enjoyed it, I dragged my mom onto the Internet. I don't know which one of us was more thrilled.
Oh, and the Vonage service is fantastic. I actually called Qwest and told them I was switching to Vonage. Now there I definitely knew which one of us was more thrilled!
Sorry, I keep forgetting to add the tongue-in-cheek emoticon to the bottom of my posts...
In French, Citron means "LEMON"...
Commercial VoIP is an artificial market. By that, I mean that it only has a reason to exist because of a circumstancial state of affairs, the one dictating that commercial phone companies (traditional land-line based phones) are taxed and must maintain their network with the proceed of their sales, while VoIP companies don't pay taxes and rely on people paying their own internet connections.
I mean, apart from the cost of calls, there are precious few technological advantages in placing VoIP calls instead of normal phone calls (I'm just talking about national calls to simplify). If VoIP companies suddenly were taxed or had to pay a fee to internet providers for the extra bandwidth, this "quickly maturing" market would vanish instantly.
In any case, there's little difference between a VoIP company and a phone company : they both use digitally encoding to transport voice, it's just that the latter uses (and pays for) its own dedicated lines, while the other doesn't.
3 things are likely to happen:
- The feds step in and consider VoIP companies as normal phone companies (which they are), and tax them
- VoIP companies are asked to share the cost of maintaining IP infrastructure, in return for the burden they impose on it
- Traditional phone companies start providing "free" internet with their phone services, in which case customers have phone and internet for the same price, nulling VoIP companies' value
In all cases, VoIP companies die.
I don't see how VoIP companies will survive in the long run. They're the product of the fact that the internet is much younger, therefore much less regulated and taxed, than traditional phone networks. This will soon change no doubt, and they're actually helping the government realize that the internet is a tax loophole. I think they'll all disappear soon and actually hurt the freedom (free as in beer) of the internet in the long run by their very existence.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
While the technical side of VoIP seems rather solid, traditional telcos are making VoIP startups face stiff regulation. As the article says about the technical hurdles being a necessity to overcome for widespread adoption, I see the potential regulatory mess as just as significant of a hurdle, yet the article largely ignores this pitfall for many markets. I don't want to sign up for service today that may face steep service charge increases due to successful lobbying by traditional telcos. I'm keeping my exclusively mobile line.
Been trying out Vonage for over a week now. So far, I haven't a single complaint. Call quality has been excellent, my only complaint being that it is a bit louder than my land line. All the free included features are very nice.
The coolest thing, however is being able to retreive my voicemail from the web ... or have them delivered to my Email inbox as a .wav file!
I got fed up with the fact that I still have a charge on my Verizon phone bill for "Touch Tone Service", and that high-tech features such as "Call Waiting" still have to cost between 4 and 6 dollars!!! Not to mention the slew of taxes and fees that bloat out the monthly nut...
Hopefully this threat of real competition will revolutionize the telecom industry. ...or even better, sink the baby-bells into a pit of despair!
It's not my fault! It was this way when I got here.
Maybe some of these attempts will contibute to the community network effort, but that's what we thought with widespread use of WiFi, and all that's done is added snarfing WiFi traffic to the list of amusing events at 2600 meetings.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
I'm with Vonage now, and only having one phone port in the back of the device is a bit of a drawback. However, I found that the point at which our standard phone connection enters the apartment is basically a second phone jack in one of the rooms. Plug this short RJ-11 cable into the bottom of this oversized wall plate, and you have standard phone service throughout the house. So I bought a line coupler, and hooked my Vonage box to that short cable, and now I have Vonage service at every jack in the house. My only worry was that the Motorola VoIP converter box didn't put out enough power for multiple phones at once, but so far, it's worked perfectly, and every phone in the house rings.
Absolutely love the service, haven't been able to notice much of a difference. There is sometimes a slight white-noise-type hiss when you're on the phone and no one is talking, but it stops as soon as there's some activity, and it isn't all the time. The latency is outstanding. Very, very impressive, considering how it's routing the call. I would put the overall sound quality at well above a cell phone, and only a fraction lower than a POTS.
The good news is that some new network devices (like VoIP handsets) may avoid the wall-wart syndrome of most modern telephones. IEEE P802.3af is a backward-compatible standard that delivers device power over standard CAT5 ethernet lines. A quick search shows that network gear makers are already selling switches that provide power to connected devices.
It will be nice to return to the days when desktop telephones were powered by their network connections.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
VOIP has really taken its time to arrive in products such as this one. I remember a friend of mine working on such a project as his Master's Degree disertation, sponsored by Nortel. This was about 5 years ago, in the UK, and always struck me as odd that more was not seen about VOIP.
I would most likely snap this up now if it were available in my area, as I got pissed because the phone company wants like 80 just for activating the phone line which, i might add, is already in place...its daylight robbery. So i refused, and have no phone and no internet. But hey.....
I've got a slightly different VoIP service here. A friend runs his own ISP (small, single T1) and loves Linux. He setup an asterisk server and lent me a Grandstream phone for use. The only issue I've experienced is latency during his peak bandwidth load times.
This I'm perfectly willing to deal with. I hate phone companies. I will never give Bell Canada another cent as long as I live. I have enough moral problems paying my cell phone bill to Rogers AT&T.
All communication lines going to any endpoint (home, business, sensors, etc) are quickly moving to an IP based data network. Unfortunately, there are two problems that governments and current telephone companies face:
:-)
1) Roughly 50% of their voice revenue stream comes from per minute connection charges, other carrier access charges, & regulation charges (govn't). These will evaporate when subscribers move to data driven VoIP (ie: you pay a flat fee for DSL or cable modem bandwidth now, and it can run all your voice calls to anywhere in the world). Eventually the PSTN connection part will no longer be necessary, so Vonage will disappear as we know it today, but it has finally woken up the telcos to what the future will bring.
2) Pretty much the other half of their revenue stream comes from the 'premium' voice feature services (call waiting, text messaging, etc), all of which are quickly moving from the class 5 switch into the phones themselves (aka: free).
What do you do when your primary revenue stream evaporates? Fight it in the courts or with govn't officials. Remember, govn'ts have been taking a nice chunk of that revenue for themselves as well.
We will have to move to a bandwidth & quality of service (QoS) based payment style. A minimum bandwidth is given for a flat rate (which will include -all- voice), and extra bandwidth will be provided on demand at an agreed QoS. The higher the bandwidth & QoS, the higher the fee.
Things to watch out for: VoIP everywhere, SIP phones/services, VoWLAN, current voice carriers moving their infrastructure to their IP networks, and govn't regulations dictating that comm lines (called data services & unregulated) become regulated for QoS.
The companies that move to this model last will not survive. They aren't going to like this.
Unfortunatley, the article only briefly (very briefly) covers Vonage's competition. I'm using Packet 8 and have been for some time now. I've found their customer service to be EXCELLENT, unlink the article suggests - Perhaps the author of the article did not realize that they are based on the west coast, and while many people believe this to be true, the world does not revolve around Eastern Time - Before anyone starts screaming - Im also on the east coast.
Anyway, we had the packet8 service installed about 6 months ago, unfortuntatley before number portablility was available, so we got a fresh new number. I had a minor problem in the begining, since my firewall (sonicwall) had a known incompatibility with H323 packets, This has since been fixed with a firmware update on sonicwall's side, but I solved the problem just by putting the phone directly on the WAN ( I pay for 5 IP's, might as well use them).
Voice quality and overall satisfaction was poor to fair in the first month or two. The phone numbers would come into the caller ID boxes all garbled up, since they would add a "1" to the beginning of the number, making the CID info all skew by one digit.Also, the time CID info was Pacific Time, not local time.
This has all been remedied since then. We've bought our first house and I brought the packet 8 device with me, plugged it into my network and installed a jack in the basement near where my network is setup. Simply plugged the device in, and we were up and running. The big bonus is we don't have to change our phone number, or pay bastard child SNET (SBC) any money.
I'm sure this is where VOIP has a big market - People like me who have been burned hard by the local phone company- you know, the guys that never care about you or me.
So, Give packet 8 a try - I'm happy, and I believe they offer a risk free trial.
Don't Tread on Me
I had Vonage service for about a year, and during that time I had varying call quality. At times it was as good as a land line, and at times it was worse than a cell phone. Towards the end of my time with Vonage, I had increasing problems with one-way dropouts. I'm still not sure whether it was Vonage, my cable modem or something else in my network, but dealing with Vonage support was not a good experience. The worst experience of all came when I finally decided to disconnect my Vonage service. Their number for disconnection service is nearly impossible to reach, and it doesn't allow you to remain on hold most of the time. You are forced to leave a message which no one will ever return. It took me nearly a month to finally get through to someone to disconnect my service. In the end, I decided that a cell phone was more reliable and had more consistent quailty.
The problem you will almost certainly run into with VOIP on a cable or DSL line is support. Your VOIP service may tell you the problem is your cable service, but you can bet your life your cable service will tell you they don't support VOIP (unless they have their own). My advice: keep your land line.
It's amazing that the author considers himself an early adopter of VoIP. It has been all but pasted to the main stream at this point. Heck, my grandmother mentioned it to me the other day.
I don't think you can claim that title without taking the risk of the technology's utter failure, which I think everyone will agree won't happen to VoIP at this point. And besides, how "early" can he be - even the US government is trying to take a chunk out of it at this point.
Guess he had to introduce his story somehow. I'm going to go early-adopt some lunch now.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
He used one service, and asked 2 other people to use two other services. That hardly constitutes a review. From the complaints about the other people, I would guess the writer is more tech savy and more willing to deal with minor inconviniences than the family members he had look at it.
I use Packet8, and I'm happy with it so far. Sounds way better than a cell phone, easier to use, and $20 a month for unlimited calling. It's perfect because I get lousy cell reception in my apartment and regularly call my parents several states away. I did contact their customer support once via email and was happy with the response times and level of service.
If you are planning on trying packet8, search for "packet8 coupon code" on Google - there are a number of $20 off or 1 month free coupons out there.
I have blog like everyone else
I'm curious if anyone has used Cablevisions new VoIP.
::)
In my eyes, while my cable modem has been on just about 24/7 with no problems. I find it hard to give up a regular old phone line/cell phone combo. The cell gives me plenty of free long distance and the landline is much more reliable then cable.
Thoughts? Nonthoughts?
Happy Holidays!
-- taking over the world, we are.
TCP over Bongos: During a lecture about the layers of the OSI model in our fourth year Computer Networks Course, Prof. Townsend was discussing the fact that the lower layers of the model could be replaced with any form of media. Despite this change, the upper layers would function as normal. In fact, others have implemented network protocols over "non-standard" media, including CPIP (carrier pigeon internet protocol) which was implemented using RFC1149, and reached speeds of 0.08bps. Prof. Townsend jokingly suggested that Internet Protocols could even run over forms of primitive communication (i.e. bongo drums, or even smoke signals). In an email sent out after class he offered extra credit to anyone who succesfully implemented TCP/IP via. Bongo Drums (source)
Forget high tech shmy tech... Just xmit over Bongos your neighbors will love you for it. Install VoIP over BoIP and make MoIP (Music over IP) while you speak... Now you can serenade your chick(x) at the same time!. Isn't that geek romantic or what?
MoFscker
From personal experience of having loved ones abroad -- more specifically on islands in the caribbean that charge in excess of $0.50/min for long distance to the island(up to $1/min for VoIP providers) and $1-$3/min from the island -- I have discovered that using the Asterisk PBX [asteriskpbx.org] with an IP Phone cuts down on my long distance bill dramatically. Many of these islands offer 256/128kbps dsl service for under $100/month. Add a DSL line on your side with asterisk and you're in business. The savings I've gained by free long distance has paid for the extra hardware I purchased -- FXO & FXS line cards. Asterisk does more than support PC-to-PC calls. It supports a range of telephony hardware that enables you to create your full-featured PBX or in my case: VoIP->PSTN gateway. Whenever I travel in or out of the country I can usually find complementory internet connection somewhere (or pay for one for $10-30/day) and call people to my hearts content. To them, it would appear as if I were calling from my home phone... because I am. Its really the Anti-Vonage setup, but it serves my purpose. If I need a long distance voip provider I can just add it to the dialplan/configuration. This message was written before morning coffee.
Provide a link to the earlier posting.
An actual Vonage user for about 3 months now.
I signed up with Vonage back in October, or maybe the end of September, of 2003. The intial experience was not bad at all, and in fact the Cisco ATA-186 worked flawlessly with my netfilter configuration once I setup dhcp. The intial customer support was great, with fast, meaningful responses.
I opted to transfer my old POTS phone number from Qwest, so I had a temporary Vonage phone number for incoming calls on that line. My Qwest phone number appeared as my outgoing caller-id number on the Vonage line, which was nice, since several of the people I call use caller-id and/or distinctive ring features.
Then the trouble began.
To transfer the number, you have to submit a Letter of Authorization along with a current phone bill. I asked them if I could scan and email the docs, and I got an immediate response with instructions to email attachments of the documents to a particular email address and they would print them out. I thought this was great!
First attempt, scanned them in at a resonable resolution, sent them in, got a response that they were not legible. No more informative than that.
Scanned them in again, this time at 300 dpi greyscale and sent them as TIFF documents. They looked excellent, if I may say, but the response once again was that they were not legible. I suggested that there would be no way I could fax documents at a higher resolution using any fax machine I had access to, so they cancelled my transfer.
At that point, I was a little ticked, and a couple of days later I learned that someone finally printed out the documents and they looked just fine (as expected), but then nobody got back to me and told me this (I have this email thread stored away in the Stupid folder...). But, once the process is cancelled, it has to be handled manually, which means as slowly and painfully as possible. Oh, and there was absolutely no way to get them to put that to-be-transfered number back as my outgoing caller-id number, so everyone would answer with "what number is this?" or "where are you calling from?" or just not answer (I get that enough when they know it's me...).
On November 19, 2003, my number was transfered. Okay, actually on November 20. Well, actually on November 21. Wait, it was done on November 22. But remember, I had that Temporary number, which meant that even thought my Qwest number was now transfered, it didn't work. My outgoing caller-id was wrong, and my incoming calls would go to voicemail okay, but then my voicemail box was assigned to the temporary number. The email notifications of this process were not useful, and in fact they never sent a final email when the transfer was "complete."
It took a good week of emails, and finally I got on the phone for 75 minutes (timer running, that's the acual elapsed time) with a tech support person there who actually asked me for my login password (which I did not give him-- so they simply reset it on their end and logged in anyway). By the time I was on the phone, just about nothing was working according to plan.
In the end, I lost access to my voicemail box twice, had this number transfer go completely sour, had a very negative experience with the number transfer person (I have her name but won't bash her here), and presently my main issue is the intermittent and extremely annoying echo on my end of the calls. The Vonage FAQ suggests this happens with some handsets, but as it happens, one of my best buds from college is a VoIP developer at Cisco and gave me the 411... basically, Vonage has to fix that little feature, but I don't fell like spending an hour hearing about how the FAQ spells it out for me (incorrectly).
To be fair, Vonage service is lower in price than Qwest service was for residential use (in Arizona) and the feature set is fine. I pulled the outside wires from the phone junction box (they're rj-11 plugs) and plugged the Cisco ATA box into my house wiring, works without a hitch (before
I'm not too worried about this.
During a call, Vonage uses about 64kb-96kb symmetric of bandwidth. On-hook it uses a neglible amount - just an occasional ping back to the home servers. This is well within the "last-mile" capabilities of most broadband providers.
As usage grows, broadband providers will likely need to buy additional bandwidth up to the backbone, but that is neither a huge expense nor difficult to buy. A broadband ISP can add a T3 without much headache.
The backbone will grow pretty easily too. With the amount of "dark fiber" already built and waiting to be activated, it will at least a decade before adding more bandwidth to the backbone becomes costly.
International bandwidth might be the only sticking point.
I can't think of a technical reason why not.
Internet-initiated calls: It may be interesting to compare this to Internet-initiated calls using Bigzoo.com's BigTalk, which cast 3.6 cents per minute to call the U.S. from New Zealand.
Free VOIP: Another option if both sides of a call have internet connections is Skype. At present it's free, and provides better quality than normal telephone. Skype is a great way to try VOIP without paying anything. Skype provides AES encryption of your calls, too. Skype can use port 80 for connections, so it can get past any firewall. (This shows the alarming lack of security of firewalls, and the need for a software firewall like ZoneAlarm that alert you when a program tries to connect.) Skype is brought to you by the designers of the original KaZaa program.
3.5 cents per minute, but free to the U.S. caller: If you want someone with only a normal telephone to call you in New Zealand without paying, you can put $10 into a BigZoo.com or OneSuite.com account, and give them the PIN number. OneSuite only costs 3.5 cents per minute from the U.S. to New Zealand, if the U.S. caller calls from a local number. With OneSuite.com or Bigzoo.com can have as many accounts as you have friends for whom you want to provide free calling.
Other ideas? Are there any options like this that aren't mentioned here?
I can get my voice mail e-mailed to me as wav files, which is really cool cause my phone-PDA playes wav files and recieves e-mails anywhere. I also don't mind the free longdistance nation wide and the fact that I get to choose my area code. but now between 802.11b access point, Router/firewall, and Voip Router, I have 3 routing devices behind my Entertainment center.
it sucks for hotels that offer free broadband for biz travellers..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I've also moved from US to NZ (Auckland). We pay for bandwidth usage here. Getting DSL from Telecom NZ that is any faster than 128Kbps costs about 20 NZ cents per megabyte usage over a monthly quota. Vonage says they have a bandwidth limiting feature that keeps their usage down to 30kbps in each direction. That translates to 8.7 NZ cents per minute of bandwidth costs in addition to their monthly fees. Paying more monthly to get a higher quota DSL account with Telecom doesn't change the overal lnumbers much.
I call the US using prepaid calling cards from Chi-Tel at 2.8 to 5 NZ cents per minute depending on time of day. I can buy a card in just about any dairy or liquor store in the city.
How does ChiTel do it so cheaply? They use VoIP. Of course they don't have to pay 20 cents a megabyte for the bits they ship back and forth overseas.
I think this shows how fragile Vonage's business model may be, while still demonstrating the impact of VoIP technology. As some other posters have mentioned, Vonage may have found a niche that happens to exist right now, but that could change as the details of pricing structures, taxes, and regulatory laws change.
We've had Vonage for a few months now and I must say overall the service has been excellent. There are issues with bandwidth, but that can be traced to Comcast. Every now and again the service will just drop... but I refer back to the last sentence.
Right now, we are in Sunny (mostly COLD) FL... our service is registered in MN. Simply mooching off of my hosts Comcast Cable and the only interruption of service was the flight down (and the damned layover).
When sitting in Atlanta, I was able to check my Vonage Voicemail.
Billing is VERY simple... direct to our credit card where we are earning points.
Overall, we are very impressed. We ARE suggesting that my parents use it (they are not that tech inclined) as they will save a ton of money in long distance... basically a free call to us... calls are free from one Vonage user to another.
Vonage is HIGHLY recommended.
"I'm not ashamed I can't function in society like I'm supposed to." - Paul Westerberg
The FCC held a Forum the first of this month to discuss this technology, the webcast is archived here.
[Please sign here]
Hey VoIP companies!
If you guys want a lot of subscibers, why don't you ship your units to APO and FPO address? There are a LOT of families overseas that have broadband and would LOVE to sign up for service like this. I personaly have tried to call Vonage but they will not ship to APO.
BTW: Vonage has it's call center in India.
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
I never realized that you could plug the VoIP adapter (Analog Telephone Adapter or ATA) into a phone jack to make the whole house live. However, Vonage's Web site says that the Cisco ATA only has enough power for (I think one or two phones). Also, at least here in Canada, people have a Network Interface Device on the side of the house. If you disconnect the RJ-11 plug from the Bell side and plug it into the ATA, the whole house will be live
A question: I know that I can transfer my landline number to Vonage. But if I'm not happy with the service, or if something happens to the company, can I transfer a number *from* Vonage *to* a POTS company? Anyone know? (Their Web site is silent on the issue...)
I think cellphones demonstrate that people will put up with with crappy, unreliable service. Hell, they'll even pay MORE for it.
Personally, I'd take a hit on availability if it meant I could tunnel my voice calls over ssh -2.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
If you plug a cablemodem and a DSLmodem into a dual-WAN router like the Xincom XC-DPG402, you remove the single point of failure from your LAN. Sure each WAN has downtimes of around 0.1% or worse. But their combined downtime is about 0.001%, or 5 minutes per year. That redundancy give the reliability (failover) we expect of our landlines. Not to mention the pooled bandwidth while up, at up to 9.5Mbps (segregated per connection, unless you get a version that pulls off connection teaming). At about 2x$50:month, it's certainly a lot cheaper than $1000:month T1s, although it's got more latency. It's a bargain if you split the costs of the lines with a neighbor, and share the pool.
--
make install -not war
We've been using Vonage in my business (Micro Office Solutions), a provider of managed office space to small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. It really lets us keep prices low, both because we didn't have to pay for the setup of a PBX (we can pay for equipment as we go) and because the ongoing operational costs are lower. We have a dedicated data line with a semi-guaranteed data rate and latency, so QoS problems have been very minor. The manageability is a bit of a pain because we have more than 20 phone lines and plan to get up to 200 eventually. That means you have tons of little boxes in the server room, plus the management of billing is difficult because the bills have to be directed to individual tenants. As VoIP sees significant adoption, I am hoping that VoIP service providers will start to tackle the manageability issues that are important to small to medium-sized businesses.
In the August blackout here in NYC, most of my neighbors couldn't use their cordless landline phones when the base station lost power. I wonder if a UPS would have kept a cablemodem or DSLmodem in contact with a powered WAN. Most of the datacenters in lower Manhattan have diesel generators worth days of load.
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make install -not war
With Vonage, you register your location with their website, associated with your phone number. If you take your phone adapter on a plane to Tokyo, plug into a broadband payphone, and register the intersection with Vonage, then call 911, they might send a cruise missile with a care package.
--
make install -not war
Been using Vonage for 4 months. I have a 678 Atlanta #, and a 321 Orlando virtual #.
Problems:
1) Voicemail quality is often horrid. Suspect their voicemail system is overloaded.
2) 321 # broke twice ("this number has been disconnected", not my cable box going down). Fixed within a day each time.
3) 678 # broke once ("this number has been disconnected", not my cable box going down). Fixed overnight.
4) They 'upgraded' the voicemail system with only a couple days of e-mailed warning once, resetting my greeting and password and wiping my old voicemails after a short period of time. If I had been on vacation, it would have upset me greatly to come home and find no voicemail greeting and all my old messages expired.
5) The call forwarding for when your net connection is out doesn't work reliably. Sometimes my calls forward, sometimes they go to voice mail, sometimes my phone doesn't answer, and sometimes callers get a weird "unable to reach this person try again later" sort of error message.
In short, it's not quite there yet, and avoid the voicemail, but it's cheap unlimited calling with cool features like extra incoming phone numbers in different area codes. I expected and found more problems than with the traditional phone service - chiefly because I expect traditional phone service to just always work.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
I just found the walljack where the NYNEX line terminates, into which an RJ14 plug was jacked, which was the root of my home phone wiring. I unplugged from the dead NYNEX jack, inserted the M/M RJ14 wire from the Vonage ATA, and all my home phones went over the broadband to Vonage. I could have just unplugged from the dead NYNEX jack, and plugged the ATA into any of the extensions. Totally easy, just like the rest of the Vonage experience.
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make install -not war
For ridiculously reasonable fees, many telcos already offer unlimited monthly long-distance anywhere in the U.S.
For example, I have DSL and unlimited long distance service coming over the same phone wires in my home (SBC). Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not. Why bother with VoIP when long distance is all-you-can-eat?
Granted, if I made a lot of long-distance calls overseas to people who didn't mind talking over crappy 1970's quality connections, then maybe I might use VoIP for a substantial savings. But that's not what the bulk of consumers are doing these days.
Seems to me that telcos are already realizing that unlimited packets is approximately equal to unlimited voice service. They are pricing unlimited voice to a very close price-point, and now only the hard-core would ever bother with VoIP.
Anyone know of a provider doing VoIP in the UK apart from BT? Unfortunatly Vonage doesn't appear to provide service over here in blighty....
Has anyone used any of these VOIP products over satellite internet access? I wonder if the latency and/or upstream bandwidth might be too restrictive.
www.clarke.ca
I wonder how many people or businesses have bought service from Vonage and then shipped the equipment abroad? It's got to be one of the cheapest ways to get a US phone number if you are outside the US.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I can now make unlimited, free calls to them, saving $100/month. What's more, there are no monthly charges for either of these services, all you have to do is buy the equipment -- which can be either a hardware IP phone, or a software phone.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I've hit the same problem. I went for the uncapped line for our first month and we're going to pay about $200 in overage charges. Starting the 26th we'll be on the 256k plan with 2 gigs, so we can probably keep all our traffic in that neighborhood. The thing I like about keeping Vonage is 1: calls to the SFBA are unlimited, 2: US callers can call us direct without using international, 3: the UI is excellent, the wife has no troubles with it at all, it just works. Given that I'm going to keep DSL regardless of VOIP, the DSL costs aren't considered as part of the equation (unless I go over the 2gig mark). The $25us plan gives me 500 minutes of US ld, at a cost of $.08nz, rising to .14 if I go over the 500. But the real savings is in "local" calls. The wife can easily use 6-700 minutes/mo babbling to friends in the SFBA, and to Vonage that's a local call.
It's admittedly not a perfect solution, especially with Telecom's crappy options, but it's comptetetive and offers some rather nice features (USians call a US #, we can call US numbers with ease, "local" SFBA calls are all you can eat, etc). Along with judicious use of the power switch (I unplug the ATA186 when not in use, since it can use about 500megs/mo just telling the Vonage server where it is) it's workable. An unmetered network connection would certainly have a positive effect on the value though.
ehintz
I signed up with Vonage 3 months ago and am very pleased with the service.
1. My number was ready immediately after I signed up, so I had voice-mail etc. up an running
2. The phone 'box' came 3 days later (I'm east coast). I plugged it in the network, plugged my phone in and I was calling my home number for kicks in 2 minutes (took a minute to get a dial tone).
3. Use the 'virtual' number feature, so my friends/family have local calls (from CA), very nice.
4. I wish the box was smaller, becase I travel a lot and bring it with me when there's free high speed in the hotel! No more rip off hotel phone charges.
5.If I didn't have to worry about a power outage, I'd toss my landline now.
I'm worried about all the 'fees' being applied to the VOIP world, and these rates getting just as bad as the regular phone lines. We'll see if the big boys can play in this space when they release their service in the near future.
I don't know about the other services, but I'm happy with Vonage. Is there a good comparison site out there yet?
So ILECs are double-taxed. *I'm* double taxed: I pay income tax, and sales tax on everything retail. I'm triple taxed: I own my corporation, and it pays income tax before paying me. Hell, I'm quadruple taxed, there: my corporation pays payroll tax, too, before paying me. Damn it, I'm *quintuple* taxed: the corporation pays income tax, sales/tariff taxes on equipment/services I use to earn it money, payroll taxes on my income, then I pay income tax, then sales tax on my personal purchases. The list goes on and on - there's no protection from "double jeopardy" in taxation; there's no rights at all, except the right to pay. For generations, the US federal government has spent about 20% of the US GDP (ignoring the current demented administration's unprecedented looting at the expense of bistromathic debts). That money will come from taxes, unless we start charging foreigners for "protecting freedom".
I would prefer that all taxation be completely progressive: sales tax. Admit we're a capitalist republic, and charge proportionate for the fruits of capitalism: consumption. A few subsistence items would be taxfree, like raw food, raw cloth, a low-percentile energy consumption, a low-percentile rent/mortgage. In a perfect world, only corporations would pay these sales taxes. By replacing the vastly complex tax codes with a simple 20% sales tax, we'd get the same amount of revenue to spend, without the waste and insane constraints of the tax system. Instead of the people spending >30% of our income to provide the government with 20% of our product, they'd line right up.
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make install -not war
Am I going to fire up the PC to call grandma, and suffer through the lousy audio quality? I think not.
The article discusses how Vonage works, and Packet8 works pretty much the same way. You don't have to fire up your PC to use it. You get a "terminal adapter" - you plug an ethernet cable from your router to the terminal adapter, and a POTS phone into the rj11 plug on the terminal adapter. You then use the phone as any normal phone.
As far as sound quality, Packet8 is way better than the quality I got on my cell, especially considering my apartment building is like a giant faraday cage (steel beams, brick walls, iron bars over all the windows). And it's 20 a month, while I would pay $35 just for a local POTS line, and $50 or so for something like MCI Neighborhorhood "all you can eat" is $50.
I have blog like everyone else
I'd just like to know if anyone has tried running Smoothwall with the Vonage service, and with how much success?
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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