Slashdot Mirror
Suggestions for a Home VOIP Provider?
nate1138 asks: "My wife and I recently relocated so that I could take a promising position with a better company. Her job, being the fairly progressive folks that they are, graciously agreed to let her telecommute. Most of the services she needs we already have set up, such as the VPN, and VNC for remote control, etc. Now we only have one thing left to do. Get a phone line. Her office is a long distance call from our new location, and she needs to be able to call customers throughout the southeast as well. Since we need a number with a different area code from our home, it looks like voice over IP is the only solution. I want to know what you folks think about the various VOIP providers, like Packet8,
Vonage, and
Broadvoice. Or any other that I haven't thought of. Or another way to solve the same problem without shelling out a boatload o' cash. Features are the last priority, while reliability is tops."
Are you sure your phone company doesn't have a package with unlimited in-country or in-state long distance calling?
I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole. - Leo Kessler
Depending on how much time she needs to spend on the phone, cellular might be your best bet. If you have coverage in your current area from someone who sells service in the area whose area code you're looking for, that would probably be the easiest way to get what you need. I'm sure you can still get phones which have good broadcasting power, and you can pick an appropriate antenna, so perhaps you can get coverage already. This will have the added advantage of coming with its own battery backup (unless you need to use an amplifier) and thus being even more reliable than a wired POTS->PSTN phone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have been with Vonage for 6 months now and have had no problems. I have 4 lines through them with no problems at all, including fax. It also cut my phone bill by about 1/2 because all of the long distance calls I made are all now included.
a cell phone? I cancelled long-distance service for my landline because I had no use for it. Sure, if I use it it'll cost me an arm & a leg, but the only thing I use the landline for is to write a phone number down on receipts & whatnot as I've got a machine on it to collect messages. I have plenty of friends who don't even have a landline any more, preferring to select the best plan from the various cell vendors - especially now that you can keep the same number forever.
Since you say that reliability is your top priority I'd recommend a dedicated VOIP service provided by a cable company if available. They are required to offer the same level of service as a phone company, and also included life line support. While Vonage, Packet8, and the like are all excellent services, they are only as good and as reliable as your existing internet connection.
We bought a Vonage phone to put in one of our colo's, because we didn't want to wait for the local telco provider to hook us up.
A friend of mine bought one for home, and now doesn't have a traditional wired phone at all.
Another guy who has space in one of the colo's we're in also has a Vonage phone, and has the additional service to let him use his laptop as a phone, with a little headset plugged into his mic and headphone jacks. He's very satisfied also.
So, out of 3 people I know that have it, all of us like it.
The only part I don't really like is that the Motorola router/adapter box takes a long time to boot (up to 5 minutes). But since I don't move it very often, that's not really a problem.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Vonage seems to work well so long as your connection is good. Being able to listen to your voicemail either on a phone or online is really neat.
My experience is that tech support takes FOREVER to get someone on the line if you have trouble. When I say forever, I am talking about 45 minutes plus.
Other than that, it is great.
The Linspire (Lindows) folks have quite a nice one called sipphone. I particularly like how you can plug your ordinary phone in. They're a fairly new player so currently low prices may not last.
I've had Vonage now for nearly a year and have had absolutely no troubles with it. In my experience, it is very reliable. The only times it acts up is when I am doing lots of traffic upstream on my cable modem. And then it just sounds choppy. (Of course, this is to be expected.)
Other than that, the only times that I ever lose phone service is when the power goes out. Not a big issue for me, since I live in the village and have lots of neighbors with regular phones. So, if an emergency did ever arise, I could simply run nextdoor and call for help.
I can tell you that I have used Vonage over the Optimun Online cable service and I was happy with it. My only problem (which is why I eventually canceled my service) was with my ISP, I would be in the middle of a phone call and the call would drop for no reason. I loved the quality of the service, easy to install and the price was right. Once Verizon (My local provider) came out with a flat rate phone service $49/month for unlimited local and long distance (within the US) I switched to them since a regular phone line in my opinion was more reliable than the VoIP solution. Another thing to consider is the fact that if you wife is going to be doing heavy downloading while talking on the VoIP network it will affect your sound quality as well, or at least that was my experience with it. Of course, I was getting speeds of 500+Kb/s on multiple downloads. But I didnt feel like cancelling the downloads when receiving a phone call or when I wanted to make one.. Hope this helps you in your decission.
Well, I was just spammed advertising Vonage not more than an hour ago, so they're definitely out.
Voicepulse or for the true geek Voicepulse Connect are well worth a look.
I've also heard good things about nufone
But test carefully before relying on it. For business use voice quality is pretty important and VoIP is at the "about as good as POTS" level, which might be acceptable or might not, depending on how sensitive you are to the difference in sound distortion between consumer grade VoIP and consumer grade POTS.
VOIP will still hit you hard if the power goes out, or if there are issues with your ISP.
I'd suggest wireless, or if you're here in the SE servived by Bellsouth, you can get unlimited long distance for like $29 a month.
Good luck!
I have Packet 8 service at home and love it. I have VoicePulse Connect at the office and that's more flexible. Packet 8 has failed once but it was a matter of minutes to end the outage.
It seems like the best way to do it (and cheapest) would be to call from your computer over the internet to a computer in the city you wanted to call to, which would then hook up to the regular phone line via a modem. I was looking for something like this, but haven't found anything on freshmeat, etc. (Any links out there?)
It seems quite possible. You tell the computer what local number you want, it dials it, and then just acts as a gateway between you (on the internet) and the person you're talking to (on a normal phone line). Nothing too complicated. If you get the reliability up, this might be your best bet.
you should definitely get this http://www.pulverinnovations.com/ this device allows you to used in pairs allows you to call each other through the internet and then use the ipp at you office to make local calls from that numbers area code
The $20 a month gave me unlimited calls anywhere in quote-unquote North America (step back Mexico - you're not part of North America anymore, the phone companies have deleted you.) Of course you can use the phone anywhere in the world, but you can only call Canada and the US for free with the $20 plan. But even the long distance rates are very reasonable -- for me to phone Norway is only something like 2 cents a minute.
The problem with the phone isn't the service, or which VOIP provider to choose -- it's the internet connection it's running on. If you're internet connection has a few hiccups here and there, or if you're just physically far away, your QOS will be shot. I recommend posting a follow up question of "Which ISP is best for VOIP?" Latency is a big issue, of course. Even some of the ISP's route occasionally via satellite, and that's just great for VOIP connections (great for VOIP connections... what? ...connections... bzzzzzzzzzt... what? Hello? Son of a ...!)
My conclusion is: it's okay, and it's a cheap phone. There are some sacrifices. And Packet8 is loads cheaper than Vonage and includes free equipment, or at least used to. Plus you don't have to deal with the bastards at the phone company anymore, which makes any sacrifice worth it! Hurray! But for $20 a month and no long distance, go for it, just use the referral code to save being screwed on "installation." If you just want to try it for a while, try Free World Dialup until you're comfortable -- although that's a lot more complicated to set up versus a ready to run system like Packet8 or Vonage. Good luck.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
The only bad thing I've heard about Vonage is that it can take a long time if you want to transfer your current phone number to vonage. Check broadbandreports.com for more Vonage reviews
If you're in their service area, you might check
out FeatureTel. AFAIK, they only service the Raleigh / RTP / Durham / Chapel Hill area of NC right now.
Also, in at least some areas, Time Warner Cable is now offering home VOIP service. So if you're in the TWC area, you might give them a call.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
With the telecomute aspects of the position, its important to remember that there are two sides to the phone expense equation. Not only do you want to minimize your own expenses - but you do not want to show up as an extra expense in the office in cases when people want to phone you.
To get around the situation, a virtual phone number that is local to the office is a great (and inexpensive way) to eliminate any costs associated with someone from the office phoning you at home.
As for providers, I just signed up with Vonage a week or so ago and have no complaints so far.
I make too many calls to the US from Australia and I've heard tht you need 200ms pings. I can get 150ms pings to some places in San Jose but typical ping times are 220 to 250 ms for random places in the US. What I'm looking for is where are the gateways located? What are their unoffical rules about getting connections that aren't from the US? How much does the adapter cost and how much does it cost me if I bail out of their serivce in the 1st month?
Use a ham radio. 20 meters is usually open this time of the solar cycle, and when sunspots start to dwindle just move on down to the 'ol 40. Hell, if you can handle 300 baud, you can even do VOIP over tcp/ip over radio, genius!
I am in the same situation. I moved from AZ to WA but I am still employed by a company in AZ. I am a software developer and I work from my home. My wife is a graphic designer who has lots of clients in AZ.
We have a Sprint cell phone with an AZ number. Because we are Sprint wireless customers, we were offered a $15 a month, all-you-can-eat long distance plan for our home phone. That allows me to call my company's office to talk with coworkers.
It works out pretty well.
DSLReports.com maintains a forum for VoIP providers as well as numerous reviews of Vonage, Packet8, and lots of others.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
A coworker had vonage...Almost got me to switch too, but then he started complaining about latency issues..etc.
I have had MCI "Neighborhood" program (http://www.theneighborhood.com) for almost a year now. $49 gets me unlimited local and long distance service. Sign up under the Blockbuster promotion and you get a certificate for free game or movie rental for every $25 (so I get 2 per month). I have never had a problem with the service and it is chock full of features including the ability to listen to voice mail over the Internet and getting alerted to my pager, cellphone and/or e-mail when someone leaves a message!
I've been a Vonage customer for about 5 months now. My wife and I ditched our POTS because we realized it was costing us $34/month for absolutely no services (this was with Bellsouth). We decided to transfer our POTS number over to Vonage. Unfortunately, the old telco's like to rape customers by holding on to phone numbers for as long as possible (basically, the longer they hold your number, the longer you have to pay them). Bellsouth finally transferred my number to Vonage after about 90 days (bastards).
We haven't regretted switching ONCE. We use the lowest call quality setting and can't even notice a difference. We have a cheapest plane they offer ($14.99 for 500 local/long distance minutes / *every* feature they offer including caller id, voicemail, etc).
Perhaps our favorite feature is the web interface for doing everything. I mean, really...have you ever tried to set up your POTS line for forwarding? The web interface makes it very, very simple and there's no need to reference a manual.
I would recommend Vonage in a heartbeat. Perhaps the poster's wife could just ditch her traditional land line, get Vonage, and use Vonage's "virtual phone number" feature to get a local number in her office's area code.
I have a related question... Can you keep DSL and sign up for one of these providers? Will *insert local bell or SBC* let you have a line without service?
Put a box at the office that has the appropriate port to plug into the phone switch there (if there is one). Get a VOIP phone at home and peer it up there.
Are you sure your cable company doesn't have a local and LD phone package? http://www.twcdigitalphone.com/ The majority of my friends and neighbors have switched to road runner's VoIP... and we are all impressed. 911-service, call waiting, caller-id, works through your existing phone lines -- the service is packed with bells and whistles. Give it a shot if you have RR in your area. Davak
AT&T also offers a VoIP service called AT&T CallVantage. I haven't tried them myself but it might be worth looking into.
I switched from MCI state unlimited to packet8 for a few months. I had some latency problems with packet8. I could deal with it, but my wife could not. So we ended up upgrading our cell phone plan, and ditching a separate home phone altogether.
A router with QoS helped a lot. There was a noticable difference after a did prioritization with OpenBSD's pf.
I am not affiliated with Vonage in any way, BTW...I'm just a happy customer.
I have no wired phone line. I use VoIP as my primary phone and a cell phone as a backup. That said, I am not aware that any VoIP provider meets the same level of reliability as a POTS line.
My own requirement was that my VoIP provider support my choice in SIP devices. That eliminated several of the vendors on your list as they require use of a Cisco-ATA and lock you out of it. I wanted a more 'open' service. I currently use IConnectHere. For $8.95/mo they provide unlimited incoming calls, Caller-ID, Voicemail, Call-Waiting, Call-Transfer, etc. Outgoing calls cost 3.5 cents/minute.
Addaline (http://www.addaline.com) has recently started offering DID service and has a very economical outgoing rate.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Local calling
Unlimited Long Distance (US only)
Caller ID
Three-way Calling
Voice Mail
Call Forwarding
other misc stuff
I've had it for about five months and I can attest that my phone bill does not vary. No surprises.
I hope this is of some value to you and I wish you luck with your move and your new ventures.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
Twice so far incoming calls to my Vonage number mysteriously stopped working. E-mails were able to quickly restore service in both cases, but it was still annoying. Once my international calling stopped working. One phone call, a knowledgeable tech did something and had me reset my phone, and then it was working again.
In short, it's similar to a cell phone - huge benefits vs. landlines, but the perfect reliability just isn't there yet. I would expect to lose a day or two of phone service each year. This may be acceptable to you, it is to me. If it isn't, stick with a landline.
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
MCK Communications, part of Verso, makes PBX phone extenders. Very economical, works well and will extend your office phone to anywhere in the world. That way, your wife can work as if she is in the office.
While we are own this subject of VOIP services. I would like to find one the plugs seemlessly into asterisk [www.asterisk.org].
I do not like the idea going from digital signal through VOIP convert to analog for asterisk then it converts back to digital.
I would like to stay digital all the way. Asterisk can handle ADSI, SIP and H.323. Vonage I think uses a property version of SIP, which is sucky. Anyone have anyluck integrating the two?
I recently signed up for Packet8's VoIP service, and have been very happy with it.
I would suggest that you read each provider's fine print, as some of them specifically telecommuters from their residential plans, and if they find out that you have been using a residential plan for telecommuting, will charge you the commercial rate for all previous months you've been subscribed.
You MAY find that it's not necessary to go fancy (though the geek factor is great and the price may be lower). You can also get service from the tellcos. And it MAY no longer cost an arm and a leg, thanks to competition from the geek-factor technologies.
First option is a "Foreign Exchange" line. Phone at your home office, connected to a switchboard in the city of interest (transparently, via the long-distance infrastructure).
This USED to cost an arm and a leg (or have a large per-minute charge) because it potentially tied up a long distance trunk any time you were off-hook, and a business might be off-hook essentially all day. But now that bandwidth is cheaper than air it might be another story. (Worth a look.)
Second option is to install a phone with call-forwarding and a dirt-cheap flat rate long-distance service, with the jack installed somewhere handy in the distant service area. (If you do business there but don't have an office, you can probably talk someone into letting the jack be at their site.) Set the call-forwarding to your home-office phone, and unplug the distant instrument. People call you, it transfers to your home-office phone. You pay the long distance charge for the call - which is prepaid or nearly free.
Third: Some tellcos have a service (I don't recall what it's called) that is essentially equivalent to number two but without the line to the unplugged phone. (Check with the long-distance providers, too, not just the local tellcos.) Local tellcos might still price this one sky high, but I bet the long-distance companies have a deal on it.
If you enquire about number three, it's too pricey, but number two would do the job in your price range, be SURE not to talk about them both in the same call to the tellco in question. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're right about it expanding rapidly!
I'm reviewing a bunch of VOIP services for a computer magazine. I've tested five so far, and as far as sound quality goes AT&T CallVantage has been noticeably better than the others. No noticeable latency, which is more than I can say for some of the other services. I suspect it's because voice traffic spends relatively little time on the Internet before getting punted to AT&T's long distance network. However AT&T's service was a bit more difficult to configure -- I needed to use their router instead of my own firewall/router, which I found perturbing.
I am not a Multitech droid, I just use their boxen.
Anything you get will be better than Verizon. My home line went down twice last month and every time incompetent morons required someone to be home while they "fix" it.
Telus appears to be a pretty good VoIP Provider.
Check out their website, they even include it in with a rather promising DSL service. Tho which im sure requires a regular phone line - heh.
We've called them twice and have never been on hold longer than 5 minutes. We have had our Vonage service for almost 2 years now and have been completely satisfied with it. And even better, they lowered the price.. twice! :-D
I've been a vonage customer for a bit over 6 months. The service is reliable, we've never had an outage that I'm aware of. You must have a reliable broadband connection - when I'm doing either a lot of downloading or uploading, the service degrades tremendously. They just dropped prices on the unlimited plan, I'm sure to compete with the bundled deals the phone companies are coming out with. I recommend them as long as you're not someone who's going to saturate your broadband connection with other traffic.
I've been with Vonage for several months now and I must say that the voice quality has been great, and I have not had any down time or disconnects.
In addition, they have excellent customer support. They are polite and actually trouble shoot problems. I could not call Iran through Vonage even though their website stated that I could. I called their tech support and they resolved the issue is a short period of time. They both e-mailed me and called me to let me know that the issue has been resolved as opposed to just closing the case once it had been fixed.
Basically they actually try to attend to their customers'needs and try to keep them happy.
It is possible to have a phone number for another area code run to your home, it's called a Foreign Exchange. They have a one time setup cost, and then some monthly maintenance fee. I have no idea what the cost is these days, but 11 years ago I paid $400 to have one run from my rural home so that I could make local calls to an ISP. It was much cheaper than paying long distance 24x7 to be on the internet.
Like I said, I have no idea what they cost, but it might be worth looking into, phone rates are much different than they were 11 years ago.
You will most likely need to talk to a well informed phone company support person (i.e. supervisor), probably in the business services dept., to get one of these installed. Most of the regular grunts have no idea how to order one for you.
If you already have a landline and live in MA, RI, or NH, you can avoid the hassles of a VoIP phone by using a super-cheap VoIP-based calling card from RNKTel:
$10/3000 minutes to USA and Canada, with NO connection/maintenance fees if you use a local access number. I have been using them a couple years and always wondered how they did it at that price--recently went to the corporate homepage at rnktel.com and noticed they now call themselves New England's #1 VoIP provider.
talk1000.rnktel.com for the cheap north american cards.
onecent.rnktel.com for supercheap long distance to other countries (1c/min to Oz/NZ, Japan, HK, China, most of Europe...)
I have had Vonage for 6 months and just cancelled today.
Very cool concept, and I'm a big fan of the company. Great product offering, great customer service, and super convenient in many respects.
But, I discovered a few limitations, and eventually decided that I just didn't need the service anymore.
The latency was a big problem for me. The latency for calls when using Vonage on my cable Internet connection (Cox in So. Cal.) was typically almost 1 second. I estimate that because I could hear the slight echo when the signal finally made it to the other end of the call, and because my friends would ask me what was wrong with my phone. After a few frustrating business calls, I stopped using it for important phone calls and only used it for a few evening calls to friends that were willing to tolerate the latency that reminded me of an international call. The actual quality of the sound was fantastic--no gripes there, but when you are stepping over the sentences of the other person constantly and having to wait for one another to finish sentences, it became very frustrating. I literally used my cell phone with 50% signal strength for important calls, since it had very little latency compared to Vonage on my Internet connection.
I did not tried Vonage on my DSL service at my new residence (due to wiring issues mentioned below), so unfortunately I can't offer a comparison of cable vs. DSL in terms of the latency. (And yes, I followed all of their tech support recommendations and opened up the swath of ports that they recommend to incoming traffic.)
The second issue that I had is that the phone must effectively be located next to the Internet connection (cable/dsl modem/router, etc.). You either have to run an Ethernet cable if you want to locate the Vonage device and phone elsewhere, or you have to run a long phone cord if you want to locate the phone elsewhere. Maybe there is some means of routing the signal into the copper wiring in the house, but I wasn't going to bother. My cordless phone crapped out, so I just gave up. My new location offers the huge benefit of actually having solid cell signal, so I now rely exclusively on my cell, and had no need for Vonage.
But, I give them tremendous credit for a great product (for those that can get acceptable call latency/quality) with a ton of features for an amazingly economical price.
> Features are the last priority, while reliability
> is tops.
That rules out anything involving the Net.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Why do we need to buy an expensive adapter to hook a telephone into a voip network?
What prevents us from plugging telephones into our now unused modems?
What sort of PBX does the company have? Using a VPN she could connect back to the company PBX and route all calls through there. For example, with a Definity PBX she could use IP Agent and everything from her end would be a local call. I do it all the time.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
I first wrote about my Vonage experiences here on and at the time I had basically put them on probation. I fear I've given away the ending of my story in the subject line, but read on anyway.
Since then, I found that I was experiencing really bad echo on certain incoming calls, even when those calls were forwarded from my Vonage phone to my cell phone. I was asked each time I tried to add more detail (by a new tech support person each time who never bothered to read through my issue history) whether my internet connection had enough bandwidth or my phone wiring had been tested... after the second time answer the same questions, I gave up. From then on, I would file additional customer care reports on the echo, from what phone numbers I was getting the most echo for incoming calls, how outgoing calls had no echo, etc. It became a major waste of time, and the fact that Vonage refused to acknowledge that they might have problems in their PSTN-to-VOIP bridges in certain exchanges, choosing instead to pass it off on my own house wiring or internet connection after both of those were eliminated as sources of trouble early on was quite telling.
When my local phone company (Qwest) offered to switch me back for free with 2 months of free service on top of that, I took them up on it. Yes, I went back to Qwest, which is a major indicator. I had the virtual number feature, with a second line in an out-of-state area code, so I asked on the phone of a customer care rep at Vonage if my virtual number could become my primary number once the switch took place, and he assured me verbally that that was no problem.
I'll let you, reader, guess what happened. Hint: if it isn't in writing it isn't true. Especially at Vonage.
I've cancelled my Vonage service. Aside from the nice voicemail features and the useful forwarding feature, and the reasonably-low price, I found the quality of service, the quality of their technical support personnel, the startup process, and the experience on the whole to be a major disappointment. I consider myself to be an early adopter (and I've been in the tech hardware and software business for a while myself), so I was willing to cut Vonage a lot of slack early on with the stumbles and the snafus, and they took all of that slack and then some.
BTW, I would suggest a service provider that doesn't lock you out of your own ATA device. Vonage prevents you from doing much of anything that they don't approve of, which is a major minus on top of their low-grade service.
AT&T has this great deal: $25 a month, call as much as you like, and it covers every phone number at the same billing address. Yeah, that's right.
I switched from Verizon because they force you to pay for each phone number, whereas AT&T has the flat rate.
Don't fuck around with shitty quality, no security, and dependence on broadband. Not for $25 a month.
No, I don't work for AT&T. I actually don't like AT&T, having worked for those bloodsuckers once. But I can't turn a deal like this down.
My dad got Vonage to use with his residential Cox cable modem in Phoenix. My experiences are exclusively those of the other end, a normal POTS phone. I expect to read many perspectives of owners, but probably few from my end.
Normal quality was a bit better than a digital cell phone. Those don't bother most people. I happened to have been pretty sensitive to the digitization that happens with digital cell phones, so I wasn't terribly impressed. There were periods, however, when it seemed like the VOIP stream paused (packet loss is my assumption), and it would buffer several seconds of conversation (5-10 seconds) and then play them back very rapidly once the stream was reestablished. This was not a problem when I talked to my dad, who is a very consistant speaker, although I didn't understand why he acted like he couldn't hear me during the buffer times, but it was a problem with my mother. My mother sometimes speaks in bursts, rapidly clearing out her own buffer when multiple trains of thought arrive at the station simultaneously-- when the VOIP buffers clearing out at the same time, I had to ask her to back the trains out and bring them back in slower, which was frustrating for both of us.
With a good ISP, perhaps with a business class DSL connection (I'm in the "shared cable systems are bad" religion, although there are fewer of us left), I would imagine that most people wouldn't experience my father's buffering problems, and perhaps a quality setting could be adjusted up for more bandwidth and increased verbal clarity.
You might want to check out VoicePulse. They have a program called VoicePulse Connect! that is for people who just need a SIP and IAX connection.
They have some setup information for Asterisk in their knowledge base, you might want to check that out. Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but it might be worth a look.
Well, I did once. And I called up a friend of mine, and they had filled out the "refer a friend" item so they could get a month off. So, I called up the friend and bitched them out for hading out my email...
But seriously, I've had them for about 2y, and my monthly price has gone from about $80 through three price decreases down to $30... without me asking them to "adjust" my account price.
On the down side:
(a) technical support sucked about 9 months
ago (I don't know if it is better now),
but it rocked about 18 months ago. I think
they just didn't anticipate the demand...
(b) quality of connection depends upon the
cable/dsl service you have. If your pages
are a bit "choppy" when you download, you
can bet vonage will also be choppy. It's
not their fault, but something to be keen
aware of.
Like we need another one every other week.
Yeah, yeah, i'm gonna get modded down but I gotta vent a little.
I needed to purchase a RAID system so I submitted a request to ask info about people solutions and suggestions about inexpensive ( $2000 ) stand alone hardware RAID systems or using windows or linux with an IDE RAID card.
That was rejected but since then there have been dupes and the bi-weekly VoIP story.
Like I said, I'm gonna get modded down ( and I understand why ) for whining but I do we really need yet another VoIP story?
A Canadian company called mobitus offers zero monthly fee, excellent software, and very competitve rates - it also has the advantage of being outside of the FCC's reach. I've used their system for quite a few months, and am quite happy with them. Plus, any support calls I've had to make (about 2 in 5 months) has been answered immediately. That's one things about those Canucks - friendly ;)
I brought this issue up with my wife last night and told her that I wanted to give Vonage a shot. The ONLY restriction she has is that we keep our existing phone number. As far as I can tell, Vonage is the only provider that allows you to do this. Is there any other company that will let me keep my existing number? I just ran a bandwidth test, and I'm getting 3.1 megabits per second (Comcast, Atlanta) so I'm not worried about that. Thanks.
Everyone likes to quote how crappy VOIP can be if network conditions are crappy.
Although that's true.. it's usually very over exaggerated.
I've used VOIP in rather deplorable network condtions.. behind several layers of low-quality NAT routers, on 256kbps cable modems that are themselves behind more NAT, with the line pinned with downloads and uploads. yes, quality drops, yes, latency increases... yes if you really let things get shitty, it gets useless... but in general, it works great, and the flexibility and savings are awesome.
We did a review of Vonage a while back on Techfocus - it was /.'ed at the time, but I'm not finding the link now. Anyhow, here's the link to the review. It's been a bit since it was posted, but the fundamentals remain!
I have just started working with Broadvoice. So my opinion may seem slanted. I have enjoyed using Broadvoice for the most part. I have notice some problems with the service while downloading large files, but you get with any service you would use. According BroadBand Reports we are number one in the VoIP Market. We are also lauching into new markets and new features soon.
--end of line--
"Features are the last priority, while reliability is tops."
There you go. You just said it. Don't bother with VOIP, yet - it's just not worth it.
I used Vonage for about 9 months before I finally decided it just wasn't worth it. After 2 weeks back on a landline, I won't be going back. I get unlimited long distance in the U.S. for $20/month. Ask around - it's not hard to find similar plans in most areas of the US.
Dropped calls, weird echos, customers complaining about me talking "through a tunnel" were the order of the day with Vonage.
I'm on a fixed-IP DSL 1.5/384 - well beyond the specs they specify, and it just wasn't there. Little issues - the Cisco router needed rebooting, etc.
So, I'm back to a landline, and using a $6 phone I dug up out of the junk drawer in the kitchen, loving it, and wondering why didn't I go back to landline a long time ago?.
Remember, nothing is more important than your connection to your customers. The savings of $20/month or so is false economy when it costs the satisfaction of your clientelle.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
VoicePulse Connect, I believe.
VoicePulse Connect supports SIP or IAX.
I am unsure if other regular VoicePulse services support your choice of SIP.. they very well may.
VoicePulse definately "gets it" though.
I think packet8 might support other stuff as well.. I can't remember.
I don't think vonage is proprietary, just that they won't release any of the information you need to connect.
Why are we stuck calling this great tech "voyp" or V-O-I-P? Why is that damn "o" in there? If it were called "VIP" we'd get lots of brand-loving followers to help us get to critical mass faster, without all the confusion and jocks beating up geeks. Is it too late?
--
make install -not war
Depending on what plan you can get, I just use a cell phone from the location I want a number at. Sprint has worked well for me and with a Treo I can use PdaNet to access the Internet when I am on the road.
SiPPhone's forums: packet loss and connection problems
I have been using the Call-in-One adapter for two days, and I am still unable to get a good call quality - people are not able to hear me very clearly. The quality so far is worse than the PC to telephone services like 4ecalls. I hope that this will improve.
Just one other question, while I am making a SIP call, the "activity" light is not steady. Is this normal?
If you already have a land line, an upgrade to unlimited long distance might not be much more of a stretch than paying for top Vonage service. SBC has unlimited local and long distance for $48.95/month. Sounds high, but when you figure $29.99 for Vonage and $15-$20 for local line (if you're going to have one anyway) it's not so bad, and it's easy and reliable. Who's your local provider?
For example Qwest has a long distance plan with a maximum of $25 per month.
http://www.qwest.com/LongDistance/
I have no affiliation with Qwest, I don't even use the plan since I don't do that much long distance. I just thought something similar might be useful in your situation.
I have AT&T. Bad: Rare drop-outs of a few seconds; dropped calls; sometimes one-way audio; too often the Locate Me feature doesn't ring the other phone; can't call Canada for free (unlike Packet8); may be causing 2-second loss of traffic through the TA hub exactly every 60 seconds. Good: Very low delay, great voice quality; TA directly faces network so great local QoS (voice has higher priority than other port, e.g., PC).
Colleague has Packet8. Bad: Frequent audio distortion; slightly noticeable delay; no QoS on TA (behind firewall) so, e.g., PC downloads cause packet loss. Good: Stable calls; inexpensive; can call Canada for free.
Here is something to consider, do you have DSL or Cable? If you have DSL, it may be cheaper to see if your phone company has a package that includes DSL & unlimited long distance. That's what I have from Verizon. A buddy of mine got Vonage and was telling me about it to get me to switch. But I don't like the cable company here (they charge waay too much), so I have DSL. Verizon has to sell you DSL without having a POTS line because of FCC regs, but I don't think those regs state a cap on the charges, and it would likely be quite a bit more than it's worth. So if are going to switch to VOIP you may want to get a cable modem if you don't already have one.
I'm very surprised about the consistently positive things people have to say about Vonage, but I also noticed that the "reviews" are very glib, and don't go into any detail about service issues (good or bad).
I'll try to break it down for readability:
1. Call quality - Varies. With some calls, I hear an echo of myself on the line, while other calls are fine. This seems only to be a problem on my end of the line.
Of course, call quality will suffer if you infringe on the amount of bandwidth the VoIP service needs. Basically, if you're using up most of your downstream bandwidth, you'll hear a stutter on the other end of the call; if you're using up most of your upstream, the other party will hear a stutter.
2. Hardware - Up until a few months ago, Vonage sold its customers the Cisco ATA 186 VoIP appliances. These were good units, but expensive. Now Vonage has replaced them with the cheaper, flimsier Motorola VT1005 MTA. My main problem with the VT1005 is that such common phenomena as port scans are enough to bring it down. To make matters worse, Vonage encourages users to keep their routers downstream of the Voice Terminal appliance, which means that a simple port scan is enough to take your entire network offline.
I circumvented this problem by putting the voice terminal downstream of the router. However, even thought the device supports static IP addressing, I can't connect to its web interface using its assigned IP address. If I want to reconfigure it, I have to hard-reset it to reenable DHCP support, and then access it on a DHCP-enabled LAN. Imagine a lay person trying to cope with these issues.
3. Customer Service - This is arguably the worst thing about Vonage. The sporadic service problems and billing issues would be much easier to cope with if customer servic gave two shits. Vonage has some of the worst customer service I've ever dealt with. The support people are ineffective and, in my experience, the calls go nowhere. Don't expect promised callbacks to happen.
4. Loss of service - A notorious problem for Vonage users is you attempt to make a call, and you're greeted with nothing but a fast busy signal. I was once unable to place or receive calls for three days.
5. Spam - Not only does Vonage spam its own customers regularly, they actually started calling customers at home with prerecorded messages encouraging people to refer others to Vonage.
6. Service package - The service package is robust. You can even check (and toggle) your voicemail from a website with a decent interface. The website logs all call activity with timestamps. Very nice. The web site control panel gives you a lot of options. This is definitely a strong point of the service. Unfortunately, the voicemail system has some bugs, but once it's setup its fine.
7. Fax - Vonage charges $10 for a fax line. I don't need a separate fax line, but I use my fax modem occasionally. Oops, Vonage don't play dat. I tried for an hour to send a fax through Vonage without success. If you want to send or receive faxes with Vonage at all, you need to pay them an additional $10/month, regardless of whether you want a separate line to do it.
8. Setup and billing - If you already have a landline and you want to keep your old phone number, switching to Vonage is not fun. Expect to pay concurrently for both your POTS and Vonage service until Vonage and your old telco get around to transferring your phone number. This takes weeks if you're lucky, and months if Vonage screws it up, as in my case. Vonage starts billing you from day one, even if you don't actually have service yet (which you won't).
While Vonage tripped over its own feet, I paid SBC and Vonage for three months of service... except I only hav
I'm using Vonage in Toronto, Canada, on the Rogers cable internet service. I've had it for about 2 months in two different locations. I got rid of my POTS line, but I still have a cell phone. On the whole I'm satisfied with the service, but I'll be more satisfied when the reliability of my internet service improves.
The sound quality is very good - much better than GSM cellular. The person on the other end usually thinks I'm calling from a regular analog line.
The reliability is also very good - again better than my cellular - but definitely worse than my old land line. After 1500 minutes I've had 2 drops, a couple of calls in which the other person complained of my voice disappearing, and one call which seemed a bit off. I haven't noticed any problems with latency.
I've encountered a couple of phone numbers that can't be accessed from this line but can be accessed from my cell phone. These are irregular numbers like some 1-800 numbers and the number for calling the phone company. This wouldn't be so bad if there was a message informing you of the problem, but instead the number appears to be always busy so you won't know what is going on.
The features are great. For example, when somebody leaves a message on my voice mail a copy of the message arrives in my E-mail inbox immediately so I get it even if I'm at work. In the past, my wife would listen to the msg when she got home from work and she would save it and then forget to tell me. Managing my account, my preferences, and my mailbox via a web site is great, or at least it could be if the site wasn't so painfully slow.
I'm saving about $25 per month. In the past I paid $7 for the voice mailbox and $8 for call name display, and these are free with the Vonage service.
Some other, less important, comments:
There is no call name display, just call display.
I have to prefix every number I dial with a 1. This is a nuisance and can cause some minor problems, eg. my phone's call-back feature doesn't work because it doesn't emit the 1.
I'd like to get a 2nd phone number (with a distinctive ring) and voice mail box for my wife so she can have her own greeting for professional calls, but this can't be done. The only way to do this is to get a 2nd account and separate phones.
For those of you north of the border (the icy wastes known as Canada), Primus provides a decent service. For about 25 loonies per month, you get unlimited local service (in the area code of your choice, as long as they service it) and reasonable long distance. They send you the equipment and (supposedly) pick up the return postage as well when you cancel. No signup fees, which beats all the Bells and Telus right there. We've found sound quality to be reasonable, certainly no worse than a cell phone and much better than our first try at VoIP a couple years ago. Worth a try!
Vonage (and all voip providers) is dependent on many infrastructures to work. You have to have power, internet, and the blessing of the pope to make calls. I found myself constantly searching for a more releable cable provider, and bought an expensive UPS to keep the router, modem, and voip boxes going. After all that, the power knocked out the cable company. And we have frequent power outages. I was looking at 4 outages of more than 2 hours a month.
I had just about had my fill of Voip, when my ISP blocked a bunch of ports because of internet worms (119, 53, some other ones) which Vonage depended on. After that, I totally lost any connection, and went a week trying to resolve the problem, while my relatives tried fruitlessly to call me.
Voip for reliability? Don't.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
One neat thing with Vonage is you can get a phone # with a non-local area code. So if you're in CA and have relatives in NY, you can get a 212/718/914 number. This, of course, means their calls you you are local calls for them. It's $4.95/mo for you, tho.
Coolness!
I just got my service activated today, so I've been poking around and seeing what's what. So far, it seems pretty good.
As a matter of fact, I plugged in today and did indeed have a few hiccups. I could not get the MAC address to register and it took two calls to tech support to find out why. the first call ended in disconnect when the CSR placed me on hold and the second tech had to research the problem. It seems that my MAC was never registered in their inventory, so the system had to understand that my hardware existed. After a few hours (at least when I tried again) the sign-up went well. Once signed up, did a reboot and had a signal.
.wav format), email notification of new messages, call forwarding, call ID, call waiting, call return (*69), caller Id block, busy redial, and 3-way calling.
So far, I'm impressed with the features. Voicemail (you can set it so that new messages are emailed to you in
One feature I have enjoyed already is detailed billing. I like the features of cell phones where it will often show detail of the called numbers as well as sometimes even incoming calls. Since I have to sometimes file suit against telemarketers for violation of the TCPA, it is highly beneficial that I have a detailed listing of when calls were made.
You can place the hardware either inside or outside the firewall (if inside open ports 50605061, 53, 69, and 10000-20000 on UDP protocol). If you plug the device into a wall outlet in the house (making *sure* to disconnect the house from the street connection) you can use any other phone in the house as you normally would. Ad of course another last advantage is being able to take the device with you so that you can plug it in and use the phone whenever on a broadband connection. If you make a lot of calls to someone in another country, you could even try purchasing another device and sending it to them so they can take calls as if they were local (to you). I wonder how ling it will be before scammers, spammers, and other scum use this to appear local or in the states, yet be running things from Nigeria or other safe harbor.
Right now Best Buy has a pretty decent sale. I used a 10% off Memorial Day coupon to bring the price to 81 and then it comes with a mail-in rebate. If you use their rewards program ($10 a year) you get 50,000 bonus points for purchasing this item (which equates to 4 $5 Gift Cards). Circuit City has it for 79-50 MIR if you want to go that route.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
You should be able to have dsl on a phone line from local phone company but pay minimal fee of $5-$15/month for a "dial tone"
m od e=flat
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,9631350~
"There is a very slight delay in the system. It takes a while to get the rhythm of a conversation down using VOIP. Expect the other party to pause before replying. Try and make your sentences deliberate so the other party will expect a pause. You get use to it pretty quickly."
In other words...Vonage makes you...talk like...William Shatner.
The only time I've noticed my service being out is when my cable modem went out for a couple of hours, but I had entered my "Network Unavailabilty Number" so my calls automatically went to my cell phone when there servers couldn't reach my telephone adapter.
You can check out their site at www.nuvio.com. Hope this helps.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
I just switched to Vonage at the beginning of May and I honestly have to say it was the best thing I could have done in regards to my phone plans. My situation is such that I am living in Canada, working for a U.S. company and having to make day time long distance calls all over north america. My previous cell phone bills would be anywhere from 200-650.00 / month! Now that I've switched to Vonage, I'm spending 50.00/month (CDN) for unlimited long distance in north america and unlimited local calls which is a fantastic deal as far as i'm concerned. I haven't had any troubles hooking up their hardware to my home office network and it's worked great from the start. the only time i've had to call tech support was when i was having trouble dialing out and then i found out that the problem was that i had to dial 1-area code-number at all times, which is something they plan to fix in the future. Tech support took me about 4 minutes to reach and they were very helpful right away.
I highly recommend the Vonage VOIP service, it's cheap, reliable, high quality and has many features.
You need a minimum of 90 K/s upload speed as well, don't forget about that. It shouldn't be a problem, but something to keep in mind.
Some of the other VoIP have the number portability, maybe all, but I can't remember off hand. Definitely vonage isn't the only one.
If your wife's work has centrex, she can get a centrex line and be able to just call into the different extensions. There wouldn;t be any extra calls because she could just bounce from extension to extension on her own trunk. It takes away the phone of getting to learn VOIP but her work can pick up the phone bill
If you are using vonage to talk with friends, that is OK because awkward latency issues that crop up now and then won't get in the way.
With customers it can give people the impression that you can't afford to use a landline and are with some cheap telecom.
Customers like to feel that they are dealing with the best, and that your business is successful enough to afford the best in terms of com devices.
Cellphones, VoIP, it's all good, but for a business phone I would not suggest a cell. I have a cingular cell, but I've got free cingular to cingular calling, all in all I use about 1500 minutes a month, just for personal phone calls, and I also work at an ISP and that plan would never work for conducting business because we use about 8000 minutes per month during daytime hours for support calls. If your slick enough to set up an asterick box (what we use at work), she can set hours to recieve calls, voicemail, phone busy messages, and use a VoIP provider (can't remember it's name now). The one we use provides us with an 800 number, and incoming and outgoing is less than 2 cents per minute in the US and around 5 cents per minute international. If you are interested in what that carrier is email me at lwoods@ycnx.net
Vonage++
Picked up Vonage for both of my folks and they haven't looked back. I'm a week or so away from ordering a line for myself. At my folks', I've disconnected telco service completely at one location and have set the other to metered service (required for DSL). Other than Comcast sucking ass (Speakeasy + Vonage is the way to go, IMHO), I haven't had any complaints or problems and can only say, "this is the way phone service was supposed to be implemented."
I wish Speakeasy/Covad could offer "raw-dsl" (DSL w/o needing a phone number attached to the line), but I'll suffer until the telco's get smacked around by a new FCC chairman (let's face it, Powell doesn't have the guts to make this happen).
-- Sean Chittenden
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I currently live in the Netherlands, and use Tele2(for english: http://www.tele2.co.uk/).
I can call anywhere in the USA and Canada for about 5 cents a minute.
The way you use it is by first dialing "1602" then the rest of the number.
It so so unbelieable cheap! I call call people in the states for less than I can for people who live here.
Does anyone out there know of a company offering a simular service in the states?
If anyone has any good ideas on how to get at the DTA-310's advanced configuration menu, I'd love to hear them. I've had my packet8 service for a month now, but I haven't cracked that damn config password yet, and I'm curious what I can play around with behind the curtain.
Other than that, Packet8 has provided me with an adequate degree of service, and for a great price. I'd recommend them.
You must have a POTS (plain old telephone service) line. They are usually regulated by the state, and are mandated to provide service with minimal downtime. This usually means built-in redundancy in the entire system (including power). When the WTC towers went down, I was still able to call out on a POTS line. When the Northeast Blackout occurred the following year, I was able to call out on a POTS line.
As critical as internet service is, I doubt it has "5 nines" in reliability. When it goes out for two-three days, those are days you can't remote access the internet, or use VOIP to talk to people. You could try having POTS, DSL, Vonnage, and a cell phone with some form of data service, but then we're not talking cheap.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Cellphone is the way to go.
Asterisk anywhere... First, place an asterisk server (with 1 FXO) at your employers office. Then place an asterisk server at home (with one FXS). Let the asterisk servers communicate using the inter asterisk protocol. Then you can connect your plain phone to your asterisk server, while having a phone number of your employers office. The receptionist at the office can transfer calls to your phone like she'd transfer to any other employee in the office. If you call customers using that phone, your employers gets billed. Customers won't even know your not in the office (except for the crying kid in the background).
I've had Vonage for several years now and not only is the service and quality great, but I can truthfully say that Vonage is the only company to EVER voluntarily lower my phone bill...TWICE! (Without me asking.)
I love Vonage and would recommend it unhesitatingly.
While living in Europe, Vonage is the absolutely cheapest commercial way I can call the US. My long distance bills have gone form around $300 per month to $15. Random observations:
:(
- I've never used my 500 minutes.
- Vonage is cheapest way to call TO OTHER COUNTRIES IN EUROPE!
- Be aware of the hidden cost of broadband.
- A freind on DSL does not have fast enough international traffic to use Vonage.
- The Vonage "speed test" is always "too busy" to use.
- Vonage said they would switch me for free to the "classic" 503 Oregon area code if it becomes available again.
- Their recent pre-recorded sales call was not cool... arriving at 3AM. They promptly said they would opt-me-out from such solicitations.
- No problems with the Motorola modem, despite early reports of trouble (all Comcast specific when people did not power-down long enough.)
- Grrr. Can't find a two-line cordless phone here. Another hidden but cool cost. Siemens uses standard AA and AAA NiMH batteries! (And has locking keys!!! Though I don't have a garden.)
- Annoyingly, Vonage has taken things TOO far and has a pulsing message tone with no real use. It seems to know I have a message waiting in e-mail. Not annoying enough to investigate into turning that "feature" off.
- Looks like they are pushing account-upgrades right now to cover perhaps regulation costs but the price still rocks.
- While the Motorola does QOS, I generally put it behind a Linksys and have had no trouble. It is certainly more primitive than a Linksys but could suffice as a basic NAT router.
- SOME calls were dropped early on. None lately.
- SOME calls a stuttery/jittery and calling again has always resolved it. The ring is jittery so I can hang-up before the answer.
- No delay. Amazing. Basically mobile-phone or better quality and more consistent (usual too-far-from-base cordless phone noise would apply.)
- No trouble with customer service.
- If only they would accept faxes and route them to e-mail like j2 so I could eliminate them.
- (My US voice and fax numbers go to j2 and voice/messages/faxes arrive as e-mail messages. I could forward voice to Vonage but then I would get many calls in the middle of the night.)
That said, I am very pleased with Vonage and it has saved me hmm, over $2000 in 6mos of use. I whish I had found it sooner. I researched SIP phones but maintaining my own VoIP to POTS gateway still sounds like a pain and would cost much more.
Previously painful words: "Sure, I'll hold."
MD.
Well, if your wife's company happens to have a VoIP/IP Telephony-based phone system, then she can most likely just have an extension off of it. We do that all the time with our Mitel 3300. Just plug the Teleworker phone into a broadband connection anywhere and it becomes just another extension on the phone system. It works great.
I signed on with Voice Pulse at the beginning of April. I have used the service from two locations, both on Comcast..
.06 for Voice Pulse - $4 on my last bill, so it adds up).
I get drop-outs. Oddly, I even get drop-outs from the other party. That's odd given the 3 Mb down speed.
Their efforts to resolve the problem have been weak.
Further, Vonage has upped the stakes by lowering their unlimited service to $30 from $35. Vonage international rates are also much cheaper (.02 to Germany vs.
I asked Voice Pulse if they would be matching the Vonage pricing and they said "our prices are on our website". That is unfortunate because they are not otherwise differentiated from Vonage. If you are going to play in this disruptive market, you must react when disrupted.
I will be dumping them mid-June, probably for Vonage or Packet8.
I think the important thing in choosing a VOIP carrier is looking at what it will cost you to switch should the service quality dip or better pricing become available elsewhere.
Also, for two years I ran my own VOIP coast to coast using a pair of VOIP Blasters, using the open source Fobbit software, at a total cost of $60 in hardware. That solution was more reliable over two years than Voice Pulse has been in in 1.5 months. Those VOIP Blasters rock!
Drop-outs aside, I do like the Sipura hardware that Voice Pulse uses. It has two lines and they can each be provisioned to use a different carrier. Kinda slick, though I have not yet used it. Voice Pulse also has a more open model regarding hardware than most others.
I tried Vonage, and the voice side of the product was great.
Faxing, on the other hand, wasn't so good. I have an HP Officejet Scanner/Copier/Printer/Fax and it would not work with Vonage's service.
Tech support tried and tried, but nothing could get my fax machine to work with the servce, so I had to drop it.
-ted
ZDNet has an article on VoIP and Internet phones, and they review the providers as well.
If you just want another number with a different area code for receiving faxes and voicemail, consider EFax or J2/JFax you can get a free account not in your area code, and it will send all faxes and voicemails to your email address. If you pay extra, you can get the ability to send faxes over the Internet from that number, get a 1-800 number, change the number to a local one, etc.
Good luck!
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
We recently opened up a new R&D office in NJ (or headquarters is in MD). We decided to get Vonage lines for everyone there (one POTS line came with the office space). The experience has been solidly positive all around. I'm now on extended assignment in GB-London, and i brought the Vonage box with me - and it just worked, first time i plugged it in. Yup, i now have my US-NJ number in GB-London. We sometimes get some very small artifacts crossing the Atlantic at peak times, but even that's rare.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
I'm in the exact situation, as far as my wife's position. I did do my homework however and found that various Security systems have some issues with Vonage setups. Plus, what happens when the power goes off, an big ups system for both my cable modem AND vonage system would seems a little silly.
I understand the argument that all a burgular need do is cut my landline.
Does anybody else have Vonage working with ADT/Guardian?
Sig it.
I hate to say this but AT&T's Call Vantage is actually VERY good! I tried Vonage last year and had a lot of quality of service issues. Dove in again when AT&T CallVantage came available because, unlike Vonage, i had no out of pocket expense to start upwith them ( i lost about 70 bucks on the vonage thing after a 3 week trial) The service is great, their web page manager is excellent and I am VERY VERY pleased with it!.Until 5/31 you can get the first six months for 20 bucks and after that it's 40 a month ( a little more than Vonage) but it is UNLIMITED calling. Check it out, and quickly! if it's available it's your best shot. Sorahl
If my wife let me cut loose SBC in favor of Vonage -- believe me, Vonage is more than ready for prime time. She has ZERO tolerance for technological tinkering of any kind (hence, she tortures herself with 17 years of marriage to someone who loves nothing more) and yet she is completely happy with Vonage-over-Comcast (VoC) cable modem.
Here in the People's Republic of Palo Alto we have 3Mbps/256Kbps Comcast cable (yes, private enterprise cable, despite the communityists!) over which Vonage works extremely well. In almost a year, we have had only one "serious" outage due to Comcast wherein we lost phone service for about 4 hours. Since we have cell phones, it didn't matter much anyway. Other than that, callers sometimes ask us, "are you on a cell phone?" due to a little delay/echo/crackling on the line caused by what? LACK OF UPSTREAM BANDWIDTH, STUPID! But I digress.
All in all, from the perspective of a guy who once *despised* cable modems and a girl who *despises* techno-gadgetry, Vonage is a satisfactory replacement for SBC; especially considering that we were paying $40.00/mo. to SBC for what we now pay $14.99 with no surprises. Which begs the question, why does SBC even exist any more? What do they add of value?
SBC (then known as Pacific Bell) totally had its chance to leap frog cable and pretty muchlet the project die on the vine. But of course, we're just a little biased on that one.
SBC: "Surely Blame Cable" for the ultimate demise of the telcos.
First, in the world of full disclosure, I own stock in Packet8 (actually, in 8x8) which I bought a few weeks after I signed up for their service in March of this year.
I have been very impressed with it so far. There was a period in late March where the service was offline more than it was on. No idea what the hell they were doing, but it was not just me. It would be down during peak evening hours for about 2 to 3 hours a night. Then it would magically start working again.
Since that period of time, I have had zero downtime for the last month and a half.
One thing I will say though, before I go much further, Netgear sucks. I had a MR-314 WiFi router hooked up and P8 went down a number of times because of it. The router would just stop responding. Resetting it would make it work, but after doing that umpteen times I yanked it and put in a Linksys. It's kinda hard to tell that the router is down when you ain't using it, but you can always tell when you pick up the phone to order a pizza and hear a fast busy signal. Everything plays nice now with the Linksys - I have had 0 router issues since I replaced it.
Call quality, like all the VoIP, is outstanding unless you have to much data flying. Then it starts to break up. P8 only uses a few K in bandwidth (I think 5K?) but a nice file transfer in the middle of a call can really wreck the sound.
It also does not work with TiVo, alarm systems, or FAX. If you need those, go with Vonage or something.
The main reason I went with P8 was that NOBODY ELSE provides Kansas City telephone numbers which is where I am. Only Packet8 has call centers here. Matter of fact, from what I have seen, P8 seems to do a lot better job at having call centers in little tiny towns out in rural areas.
Their call forwarding really is cool too. I have it forwarded to my cell phone. It rings in both locations at once. This is a problem though if you want to call your house from your cell phone - you will get dumped straight into your cell phone voice mail because the way the system sees it, you are on the phone. Keep that in mind.
Hook up is stupidly simple. Plug it in, call the activation number, and you are off and running. You can also place/receive calls from Free World Dialup accounts. That may be something to consider as well.
If all you want is dialtone, go with Packet8. They offer a barebones phone service for about $20 a month that compares to your basic POTS line from Ma Bell. No bells or whistles except unlimited calling anywhere in the US. I have several coworkers that swear by it.
I personally use Vonage, and have relied on it as my primary home phone for about a year and a half now. They recently dropped their price to about $30 a month, but you get a full featured service that compares to an advanced PBX system you'd find in an office.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
I will do a little plug for iconnecthere.com. They have many choices for various plans, including pay as you go, and flat monthly rates. They also have great international rates, and other goodies.
I have been a happy customer for more than 2 years now.
I've been telecommuting full-time for four years. I'm in El Paso, TX; my "office" is in Atlanta. Recently, my employer sent me a cool toy: a phone built by Intertel (if the case artwork is to be believed), that knows about both IPSec and my employer's internal office phone system. I plugged the phone into my LAN; within two minutes it established a secure connection to my employer's VPN via my cable IP connection, and hooked itself into the PTX. I now appear on the office phone network at extension 1003, and I can also use the office net to make long-distance calls charged to my employer, rather than to my POTS line or cellphone. It seems to be very reliable, and costs me nothing; it might be an option for the OP.
i've been using nikotel.com as the service provider and xten.com and xten as the softphone for the last half a year. it's a no frills, super cheap, good quality and reliability combination. there are no installation fees, no monthly fees, no per call fees. the only fee is 2.9 cents per minute for outgoing calls in the US. if you spend at least $7 per month on the outgoing calls, or have them charge you that much even if you don't, then you can get assigned a PSTN phone number and receive incoming calls for free. friends tell me that the quality is somewhere between a landline and a cell phone. by no frills, i means absolutely none. though they claim that voicemail will be availabe at the end of june. i love it, highly recommend it, and am surprised that nikotel hasn't received more press.
standard slashdot solution to all problems.
For what its worth, I have been using Broadvoice at home for my VoIP for about 2 weeks now. Me and the finace just moved into our first house, and decided I had had enough paying money to the local monopoly phone company for basic phone service with none of the bells and whistles.
So we got Broadvoice and its been working very very well so far. We only got the 10 dollar a month plan, for unlimited in state calling, out of state is like 3.9 cents or something like that. Both we both have cell phones, so if we need to call outta state, we use those.
I have called many people to test out the phone line, and they are always impressed by it, cause its clear!! Very clear. Plus the topper is that we get all the extra features, like voicemail, call waiting, three way calling, ALL those extra things that would make a analog phone line cost 50 bucks a month. Its working out great.
Most VoIP do not charge taxes other than maybe a dollar or so. I know like a $1.30 or something with Broadvoice, so my monthly bill is $11.30 i think.
Thats my 2cents, so take it for whats it worth!
The employer should pick up the communications expense, not you or your wife. If the employer refuses their responsibility you can probably write it off as a personal bussiness expense anyway.
I use Advanced Cable Internet for my connection. They also feature a voice-over-IP solution but there's a problem: it uses cable internet.
The one major issue with VoIP I have is the latency. There's a 1.5 second delay between all conversations, and it's because my ping is commonly ~250ms. Now don't get me wrong, it's much better than ADSL's ~900ms latency when you're using up your whole upstream cap, but it's enough to make VoIP calls annoying. Most cable internet has bad latency (fuck if I know why) so I don't think VoIP is good for those trying to ditch the local carriers.
I've also had problems with Vonage (the people behind the scenes at advanced cable voice) where calls get "choppy" or otherwise very bad in quality. I assume this is proportional to the amount of bandwidth I am using and the amount needed by Vonage, but I didn't use it long enough to find out; I ended going back to Bellsouth. Long story short, implement a traffic shaper if you intend on using VoIP.
use fewer, commas.
I had the pleasure of calling the local phone company almost a year ago now, and putting in a disconnect order. Have had nothing but Vonage since then.
My biggest concern was whether our home alarm system would be compatible (it was, just had to prepend a "1" to the dialed number) and whether the Tivo would work with it (it did, though we've since upgraded to two networked Tivo's which no longer use landlines...)
I also needed it to be simple and as transparent as possible - being a techie, I have a bad habit of making things more complicated than necessary ("watch a DVD? Simple! select the component input with the black remote, switch the optical output to PCM, 96kHZ..") and I did not want to inflict that on my family for something as essential as phone service.
Not sure how well others have done, but the only issue I can remember was sometime last year voicemail was out of service for the better part of a day. wouldn't have noticed if they hadn't told me.
I've got one business associate who has an office in NY, and another in Mexico City. Although Vonage doesn't officially support using the box outside the US (latency concern, I guess), he happily plugs it into his DSL line wherever he happens to be and it works fine.
AT&T seems to offer an almost identical service - if you can save a few dollars getting a package from them (cell, etc) it might be worth considering as an alternative.
Both AT&T and Vonage offer a neat feature where you can make incoming calls ring not only on your home phone, but your cellphone, office phone, etc etc etc., and you can answer any one of them.
Isn't foreign exchange service still available?
This is where you can get a number in a different area code or city. Unlike the good-old Ma Bell days, you don't pay mileage fees for a nailed up circuit. But beware that they may ask you to pay for a nailed up circuit that does not exist and in all likelihood cannot exist.
And how about OUTWATS, which is like an 800 number (aka INWATS) in reverse (except that it's not free): lots of, if not unlimited, long distance for any given area for one flat monthly rate, often heavily discounted relative to typical long distance providers. --O wait! That's now called the blah-blah-blah long distance blah-blah calling plan. Blah. Nevermind.
You can get a regular land line and still buy a phone number in any area code that you want. You will pay long distance charges whenever someone calls you, however.
Daniel
Since you already have connectivity to work, and they appear to be progressive enough, why don't you have them setup a SIP Proxy to their phone system and use a phone (Cisco or Polycom) or software (kphone) that supports SIP?