Anybody use Vonage or other Internet Phone?

[eedmond]

My family is buying a new house and with the added payment per month we need to cut costs. We currently are paying $40 a month for a landline. I have a cable modem and am looking at possible getting Vonage as our phone carrier. It is only $15 a month.

Anybody here use Vonage personally or a friend has it and you called them or something? Perhaps another internet phone company experience?

Thanks,
Eric

[Stalemate]

I tested a Bell Internet Phone system for a month and loved it.

It was missing 911 call handling at the time though.

The added advantage of having 2 secondary numbers in other cities, allowing people to place local calls to me from hundreds of miles miles away, was great.


The quality was superb and better than what I get on my cell phone. No delays, chirps, pops or screeches at all.

Managing voicemail through an email client (sound files attached) was the utmost in geekyness.

[+Daemon+]

im still thinkin about getting VOIP soon and vonage was what I was going for

[eedmond]

I tested a Bell Internet Phone system for a month and loved it.

It was missing 911 call handling at the time though.

The added advantage of having 2 secondary numbers in other cities, allowing people to place local calls to me from hundreds of miles miles away, was great.


The quality was superb and better than what I get on my cell phone. No delays, chirps, pops or screeches at all.

Managing voicemail through an email client (sound files attached) was the utmost in geekyness.

I heard that the 911 thing is changed now.

http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911

[ilovetheusers]

I have read that Skype (www.skype.com) is free but I think you can only use it to speak to other skype members...

I have found that the most simple and cost effective thing to do is to buy a cell phone with a decent plan and not even have a land line. My .02

[hudsonsmith]

We have a private VOIP at my company which runs between our offices over our network. The big issue is that the quality degrades signifcantly as network traffic increases, to the point where some calls have broken up completely. Also, sending or receiving faxes over the system fails more than half the time.

I keep a land line at home in order to have working phone service in the event of a power failure. Granted, cell service stinks at my house, but we have pole mounted power lines and its not unusual for storms to knock the lines out.

[WebHead]

Vonage? Hmm,.. sounds cool. I would think about getting it if their name wasn't so retarded.

[Radical Dreamer]

We have a private VOIP at my company which runs between our offices over our network. The big issue is that the quality degrades signifcantly as network traffic increases, to the point where some calls have broken up completely. Also, sending or receiving faxes over the system fails more than half the time.

I keep a land line at home in order to have working phone service in the event of a power failure. Granted, cell service stinks at my house, but we have pole mounted power lines and its not unusual for storms to knock the lines out.

Your company needs to buy more bandwidth then.

The ISP I used to work at used VOIP for their call center and it sounded perfect no matter what time of the day it was, the key is partitioning your bandwidth so that enough is DEDICATED to the voip system

[Stalemate]

I heard that the 911 thing is changed now.

http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911

As the system has not yet been released to the public yet, I can't say if Bell Canada will be doing the same thing.

From what I know, they were having difficulty figuring out a way to get the 911 operators to track down a physical location when the "phone router" could be picked up and used from *any* broadband connection.

It would still make an excellent 2nd line and long-distance calling station though.