Finally made the break today, canceled my long run with QWest my local telco.

I have had my present number with them since '91, but for the past few months have been testing out Vonage.

Vonage works great over my Internet cable connection, and way cheaper.
I can call anywhere in the US for free, no long distance charges.
Call forwarding, caller ID, 3 way calling, voicemail, ect.

The quality of talk is on par with my old land line, and people I talk to actually sound louder, have to turn the phone down some.

The voicemail is cool.
I can access it via my telephone, their web site, from another telephone, ect.
Also I get an email when someone has left me voicemail, and I also opted on the settings page to have the WAV file delivered to my inbox, pretty cool.

Gamed the other night with member Drew, and while playing Battlefield 2 I was talking also on Vonage, and both worked great with no bandwidth issues.

I am really happy with Vonage.
Cheaper, more features, and works great.

Gonna miss my old number though, I was not able to transfer it over to Vonage.
Some can do that, but the timing was not right for me to do so.

Comcast my ISP is coming out also with VOIP, but it will be more money from what I hear than Vonage.
They should be up and running within a few months.

Thanks to Jim (jrallan26) for turning me onto this.

 

Corey, keep me posted on this since my folks are running Comcast for basically everything, except phone...

 

so....how exactly does it work...

do you have special phones in your house? If not is there device the phones plug into?

can you have more then one phone?

can you use you existing phone jacks with it?

You said it has call forwarding...can you set that up to forward on like the 4 or 5 ring? Ex. If I'm out of the house I would like something to forward the call to my cell phone.

Do you still get telemarketers? (this was the reason I dumped a landline and went to using my cell phone all the time)

 

I have been concidering this option since I never use the phone and pay through the nose for service.

 

I recently bought a house and termintated my land line service with BellSouth. My plan was to just keep my cell phone and/or get a better cell plan and use it exclusively. But, I have discovered I am in a dead area. I have yet to get a land line and was thinking about Vonage.

My question is can people call your number just like a land line and you can answer it or will they get a voice mail and then you have to call them. Probably a stupid question, but I know nothing about it.

EDIT: OK, so I did a little reading on it. Apparently (pertaining to my question) it works just like a conventional phone. I may have to get this.

 

Wiil do Rival.

CynicX, you use your present phone, and this is my service.
http://www.vonage.com/products_premium.php
They give you a free phone adaptor, which is a 3 PC port Linksys Internet router, and it also has two phone jacks on it.
http://www.vonage.com/features.php?f...=phone_adapter
They even have wireless, which I will get later so I can untether my laptop.
http://www.vonage.com/help_knowledge...hp?article=111

My model is the RT31P2.
I think you can also use your present router, and just add the one they give you to it.
The one they give you is hard coded with your new phone number via MAC address of the new unit.

All the info you need is on their website.

Grn, I do plan on getting a nice cell phone when I get called back to Boeing, as for right now, this is my only phone.
I like it, I like it a lot.

Nic, it works just like a regular phone, no difference.
I have mine set to go to voicemail after 20 seconds, which is about 4 rings.
My phone also has built in caller ID, and it works as before.

I also have a QWest caller ID on the wall by my PC, and it will flash green when someone has called or left voicemail.
Now if they left an urgent message by selecting that option when they record their message, my caller ID on the wall will flash red.

 

Thank you for the links.... I just emailed it to my mom...

 

There may be other options with the call forwarding, but my wife has our set up to ring the vonage phone and her cell at the same time. That is really nice, you can answer either phone when home.

Another cool thing is you don't have to get a local number. We mostly get called by Kim's kids in Dallas, and her Mom in new york. Our main number is local for the kids, and our second number is local to new york. Both have unlimited incoming minutes, and we pay $5 for the extra number. Like having a toll free for them to use, but they can call as much as they want, with no extra cost to us.

You can also take the vonage box with you if you travel. Plug it in to any broadband anywhere & your number will follow you around.

 

In a disaster, I think your reg. phone has a greater % of being useful than anything else out there. Unless your telephone pole gets knocked out..

 

thats true for a disaster...but if a burglar cuts your telephone wire you'd still have a chance...heheh unlikely but whatever....

I imagine vonage is a major problem for phone companies...its less expensive with no drawbacks, other then you need broadband but this day in age alot of people have broadband internet. I think every single person I know has broadband....

 

SBC is supposed to be gearing up for a big move to take over the broadband market. I don't know what, but I've read a few articles (including one by the CEO) that says in the future, cable won't have the capabilities that they will.

Anyway, back on topic...

Corey, what will you do if your power goes out?

 

Got any links? SBC?

 

I remember one article I read was in Fortune magazine. Can't remember the month, but it wasn't too long ago... March/April/May something like that.

It doesn't list anything specific, I guess because they're trying to protect their "cash cow".

Think full blown fiber optics. Here's one article:

http://www.tricitybroadband.com/misc/latimes041904.htm

 

Cable/DSL service is also self powered, except for the gateway devices which should last longer than most outages even on a small UPS.

 

Vonage is cool and all, but I never switched. I couldn't live with Section 2 (Emergency Services) of their Terms of Service, specifically this:

 

i've read about this fiber optic stuff before. It looks quite promising.

I just bought a condo in a neighbor that was JUST built, late 2004. I wonder if they ran fiber optic or if its still copper wire. I wonder if I can open the telephone box and be able to tell or if all the fiber optic is at the main box.

I'd like to learn about all this stuff. From what I remember reading a while ago it seemed like all the fiber optic wires installed into these new communities were outside of the house, but still copper wire in the home making it compatible with all current telephones/modems...

 

Power does not go out to often here, and I will have a cell phone for backup emergencies when I get back to Boeing.

Heck, my present cell phone which I had turned off a year ago will still dial 911 if needed.
Its the law here, even with no service, the phone must still dial 911 I guess.

 

It's simple really... basically you're getting stuff at a speed closer to the speed of light than copper is capable of transmitting:

Somewhere along the line, you're going to have to convert the light signal to an electrical signal. But I predict one day that it will be all optical straight to the PC. Well, actually, PC's might even run on optical technology by then themselves. It's the wave of the future.

 

If you haven't done so already, make sure you setup for 911 dialing before you can use it. They make you fill out a form with your name and address to activate 911 dialing.
I always thought once the phone line is activated, I can just dial 911. Not the case with Vonage.

 

Corey, this is some great info. How well does the Vonage equipment interact with your exising home network? I already run a Linksys wireless router with four devices plugged into it already, so I'm thinking that I could swap that out for a wireless switch plugged into the Vonage device.

I'm thinking about doing this so that we can dump sprint and get some local numbers in FL, CO & NoVa for family & business reasons.