A new way to save money on your phone bill, Vonage takes advantage of your broadband internet connection to make and receive telephone calls over the internet backbone. Vonage is both your LOCAL and LONG DISTANCE, say goodbye to phone cards and expensive LD bills. No more calling card needed!
Setup
I ordered the VT1005 voice adapter from Vonage and it arrived approximate 7 days later. Hookup consists of running an ethernet cable from the cable modem (I cannot speak to DSL setup but it will work with DSL with tweaking)to the Motorola adapter (henceforth "moto" box) then running an ethernet cable from your NIC to the PC port on the moto box. Allow the cable modem to power up for 2 mintues, when its online, power up the moto box.
After approximately 5 minutes, you will have a solid green light. Plug in your phone and if you have dial tone, you are ready to go. That's the setup in a nutshell.
Next, I ported my number from Sprint to Vonage. While it only took me about 15 days from LOA to actual port, there are horror stories of it taking weeks, sometimes months to do so. I put your success rate at 50-50 based on Voip message boards regarding number transfer. If you cannot transfer your number, Vonage will assign you a number. There are advantages to doing this as your Vonage assigned number will not appear in a telephone book nor is it searchable in the CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) database. Translation.......no more telemarketer calls.
Initial usage and problems
It is not enough to simply have lightning quick internet upload and download speeds to make Vonage work. What is more important is the quality of your connection. If you suffer from high packet loss and latency, your voice quality will suffer as well. This is one piece most people don't understand. They'll test and brag about 3,000K down 512 upload speeds but complain about echo, crosstalk, and delay speech. This is directly a result of heavy congestion on Level 3 backbone, a primary carrier of internet data. This can be fixed by sending pingplotter tests to your ISP for review. Often they will simply move you to another router on their network and usually this takes care of the problem. Also, you can go to www.testyourvoip.com and run some simple tests which will give you a clue about the quality of your internet connection.
In my instance, my old Motorola surfboard 4100 was not up to snuff for Voip even though my internet throughput speeds were fine. I had my ISP replace that model with a Surfboard 5100. I also secured a Netgear router. This is a key component to make Voip work. And here's why. So read carefully.
Vonage markets the Moto Vt1005 box as a. router b.quasi firewall c. Voip adaptor all rolled into one nice unassuming box. And from a marketing perspective it makes sense. However, it simply cannot do all those tasks well. For instance, if you are on the phone and downloading a large data file, you will get some "chop" on your voice. Putting the moto box behind a good p-n-p router will allow the adaptor to simply perform Voip functions and nothing else. You will plug your PC into an open port on your router and bypass the moto box. I have my setup just like this and it works fine.
The first moto box lasted 2 weeks then died. The second one was DOA. I got my third one last February and have been running it ever since with no problems. I understand now Vonage is using Lynksys devices as the voice terminal adaptor.
Features
I'll touch on the big ones as the whole list can be found at www.vonage.com.
*Call waiting
*Caller ID
*Call forwarding
*3-Way calling (if you have sufficient upload, about 200K this works fine)
* repeat dialing
* *67
* *69
* and the NAN or Network Availability Number. This is a number that you plug in which will ring should your Vonage service go down. This can be your cell phone, a neighbor phone, pretty much any phone. Its seamless and it does work as designed. When I was in W Palm beach florida, my cell phone rang and it was my aunt from England calling! And she does not have my cell number so I knew my Vonage was down in W Pennsylvania.
Call Quality
This can and does vary. Remember, you are basically taking analog voice signals and converting them to digital packets to be sent over the internet then translated back to analog signal at the PBX trunk termination points. So, like any other packet of information on the internet, its subject to delays and partial packet loss. What that means to you the caller is a slightly wattery voice or chop. However to be honest, since I upgraded my modem and purchased the aforementioned router, I would rate voice quality on par with POTS. I make calls to UK and Cypress with no problems at all. Matter of fact, calls to UK are better than they were with POTS.
And international calls are very cheap when compared to traditional long distance. For instance, calls to UK are 3 cents a minute and calls to Cypress are 8 cents a minute. AT&T LD cannot even begin to come close to that.
Unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and Canada (as well as other Vonage users) are included in the $24.99 month plan.
Things to consider
This is not PSTN phone service and as such, it does have limitations.
1. If you power goes out, you have no phone.
2. If your ISP has networking problems and you have no internet access, you have no phone.
3. If your VT1005 dies, you have no phone.
4. 911 calls go to a PSAP, Public Safety Answering Point. This is NOT traditional 911 service! Rather, its an answering point that is NOT always staffed and does not have your address and other information on a screen in front of them when you call. Thus, you will need to give all the pertinent information when you call 911. Many Vonage users keep a stripped down POTS line just for 911 service. Last check on this indicated Vonage was testing E911 in Rhode Island. It went well and behaved just like traditional 911 service so this will probably be rolled out CY 2005 nationwide. Also, you must "activate" 911 service by filling out an online address form which you input your physical street address. This is very important as the moto box is entirely portable and it is not "hardcoded" with your actual physical address.
5. Vonage bills your CC. You will not get a paper bill to ignore or lose. If you have issues doing CC transaction over the internet, then this is not for you.
6. If you have a cell phone currently, then you have a good backup device in case your Vonage service goes down due to the aforementioned reasons.
7. Read the TOS agreement. Many heartaches and minsunderstandings can be avoided if consumers would do a bit of homework before signing up.
Finally, I would have to rate my overall uptime on Vonage (meaning there was a dial tone when I picked up the phone) as 98.5%. Is that as good as POTS? No, of course not. However, I cut my phone bill by 75% a month and gained features that I did not have with Sprint. Plus, I am able and willing to do the occasional reboot of modem-router-moto box when needed.
******************UPDATE***********************************
Acronyms:
POTS=Plain Old Telephone service
PSTN=Public Switched Telephone Network Often used interchangably with POTS acronym above.
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