Printable View
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
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.
im still thinkin about getting VOIP soon and vonage was what I was going for
Quote:
Originally Posted by a d e p t
I heard that the 911 thing is changed now.
http://www.vonage.com/features.php?feature=911
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
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.
Vonage? Hmm,.. sounds cool. I would think about getting it if their name wasn't so retarded.
Quote:
Originally Posted by eedmond
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.
Your company needs to buy more bandwidth then.Quote:
Originally Posted by hudsonsmith
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
Yup. You'd think with the number of tickets I've opened on this they would have figured it out.Quote:
Originally Posted by Radical Dreamer
A another nice thing about it is you can bring it with you if you travel and your phone will follow, to a hotel, relevtive, <work not recomended> so anywhere you go you can have you home fone.
The cable company my hubby works for is launching it soon. We will be going to it for a couple reasons..
1. We will most likely get a good discount (internet is 5 a month and top of line cable is 9) so I'm guessing it will be a good discount.
2. His family is long distance so not having to pay that bill will kick @ss!!!
With the 911 service, you have to tell vonage (or whoever) the physical location that you are setup in. So if i live at 123 Mystreet, I tell that to Vonage, and when i dial 911- the 911 system can know where i am. however, if i take my voip adapter on vacation and dial 911- the cops will show up at my house, and probably break down the door cause no one is answering it. :)
So just dont dial 911 from your VOIP when you are on the road
gotta agree with you on that one. We have VOIP phones from cisco here at my office, we're 2000 people and I never notice a single degredation all day long. Then again we have massive amounts of bandwith (all we do is remote serviceing calls). I just ordered a VOIP services from primus, I'm here in toronto alone while the rest of my family is back in ottawa until december. after that we'll keep the voip phone with the ottawa area code to make calling ottawa and getting calls from ottawa free.Quote:
Originally Posted by Radical Dreamer
as for skype, it's only free if you call another skype user and you need your pc to do it. Vonage and others actually give you a gateway to plug into your broadband that allows a regulare phone to work with it.
I have Vonage right now....Time Warner launched there digital phone which was 40.00 a month....Vonage is Unlimited also for 24.99/month.
They sent me a linksys router for 60.00 which included the first months payment along with "setup" fees. it was easy to hook up and it worked immedietely. the only small problem I had was I was downloading alot of junk and was eating up a ton of bandwidth, my wife made a call and it was breaking up a little. that was 1 time and no other problems.
I would recommend this service, it is a great alternative to an expensive landline....
Well we tried it. Office Depot said if we returned it within 14 days no questions asked money back.
So we opened and started to go through their setup. To find that we couldn't get a phone number in our area code. I was so pissed off that they were advertising it so heavily in my area and they are not even in our area code yet. My state only had 3 area codes and one is only for a single town of about 100k. Guess which area code I could get? The one area code that is only for that single town that is 100+ miles away from where I live.
We have 503 for the Willamette Valley which includes Portland and Salem. 541 for the rest of the state and 971 for Beaverton which is a suburb of Portland.
Needless to say I live in the "rest of the state" area code of 541.
Grrr.... I was so mad I yelled at the vonage guy. I didn't care, he tried to tell me that their plan was still good for me. Only if I wanted all my local friends to call long distance to get ahold of me.
Well maybe that wouldn't be so bad for my boss but....
i probably should have recommended going to the site and seeing if your area code was available.....i apologize.Quote:
Originally Posted by eedmond
I did go to their website, and I could not find that out it just said it was available in my state. I even called them and they wouldn't tell me. They said I had to go through the online setup and to do that I had to open my box that I bought from Office Depot.Quote:
Originally Posted by DiR[ëctory]
probably null now but.Quote:
Originally Posted by eedmond
http://www.vonage.com/avail.php
click your country, state, and then browse the area codes....
For anyone else looking : you can check thier website if your area code and such is covered yet .Quote:
Originally Posted by eedmond
eedmond ; my area code is not covered yet either but it wanted me to sign-up anyway :sad:
they may be cheaper than some but I don't like thier sales tactics (and probably 90% or more of others)
Ya, I don't like their tactics either. I also called to find out how much setup fees were and they wouldn't tell me because the setup fees vary by the store you bought it from. You had to talk to the store you buy it from so I did but nobody at the local office depot knew a thing about it.Quote:
Originally Posted by GrandDad
So I called their website and they didn't know anything about it. It was all just a farce. But I have been seeing adverts for a new company. Don't remember it's name. Gonna look into it next time but going to wait a few months because I changed my local phone calling plan a bit to be cheaper. See if our landline get's within reason.
Honestly I haven't had a single problem....
I signed up through the website, I looked at the unlimited plans which they all are....found my area code, two days later i got my package....it cost me 60.00 bucks for the first month and the router and that included the setup....
if nothing else i got a decent router for a decent price.