WOT: VOiP phone.., verizon is evil so why not vonage? Options

[scottb]

any feed back on this? my land line has been a mess since july with repair calls 2-3x per week with no resolution from verizon. bought a vonage kit tonight and seems to be pretty cool. can bail in 2 weeks so any feedback is welcome.

muchas gracias......

[bperry]

Here is the main reason a friend of mine who had it ended up
going back to a SBC land line.
Not sure about up in Mass. but here in Texas, Vonage plays the game
and avoids tons of regulation, Fees, and taxation by being a
"Long Distance Carrier".
Because of this, the phones won't work like "normal" phones.
EVERY call is a long distance call. You have
to dial 1+ number for each call. You can't simply do 7 or 10 digit
dialing. You have to get used to this and explain this to everyone
that uses the phone. Vonage does this because they are technically
a long distance provider to avoid the rules and regulations
and access fees of being a local service provider

His wife HATED it and she won. He now has a SBC line for her and a
Vonage line for himself - For him the Vonage line is an experiement
that lets him play with and evaluate the technology.
(He and I developed DSL and VoIP products in a company we sold off)

On the technical side:
----------------------

Vonage uses Voice OVer IP which usually uses an
Internet connection that you provide.
Because of this, the realibility and quality of the voice
is directly related to how good your internet service is.
Up in Mass, If you have DSL it is probably through Verizon.
So if you are using DSL, it uses the very same landline that you seem
to be having trouble with.
My guess is that if you are having that much service problems,
it is probably line related and not service related. This means
that its highly likely that an internet service over
DSL may also have issues.

Unless they changed their service
offerings or upgraded their infrastructure in the past few years,
Verizon really crippled (slowed down) their DSL services
because their service areas were so dense and they didn't have enough
back end bandwidth.
If this is still the case, I would suggest Cable over DSL.
Cable has higher theoretical bandwidths than DSL and in the case
with Verizon DSL, Verizon grooms up all their links on the back side
of the DSLAM into ethernet connections so you lose out on any non
shared bandwidth benefits of DSL anyway.
In very dense population areas, you may experience traffic delays
with cable as well.

It all depends on what you plan to do with your "landline" service.
For a low volume non critical use, it seems to work OK.
I've listened to calls over it and its pretty good can't really tell
the difference over a standard landline until there is network congestion.
Definitely not as good as your landline (POTS) service though but
better than some cell phone calls.
Keep in mind that internet services have no guaranteed reliability
or availability.

So when things like power go off or during storms, you may lose
your phone service. Also, you may experience problems during
heavy internet traffic, including your own or other members of your
family or even other people in the neighborhood.

FAXs and modems aren't going to work reliably if at all either.


ALTERNATIVE:
---------------

If you already have a cell phone. I would take a look at
"cutting the cord" and going all cellular.
With many carriers offering so many free minutes you only pay for
minutes during 77 of the 168 hours a week. Long Distances is also Free.


If you get a device like this cell socket or this Doc-N-Talk
You can hook landline phones to your cell phone and answer and place
calls through your cell phone using your cell phone minutes.

The extra money you save by no landline ~$30+ can buy lots of
extra minutes. or even pay for a dedicated cell that stays in your house
if you need a dedicated number for your house.

For me, I like having a single number that works wherever I am and
when I'm at home I can use my landline phones and cordless
extensions to answer my incomming cell calls or place outgoing
calls.

Hope that helps.

--- bill