Vonage- Anyone have it?

[red-beard]

There is something like a .25 sec delay in sound with the vonage. I don't hear it with TWC. I suspect that this is the culprit and maybe a recomended check for those considering the service.

And it definitely kills my bandwidth, much more than the 62 kb/sec Wayne is quoting.

James

[RKC]

Been happy with Vonage both at work and at home. Kept the work and home numbers, and had a lot of weirdness during the 30+ days it took SBC to switch the lines. But since then it's been fine (1.5 years at work; .5 years at home).

Used a Softphone on my Apple PowerBook with a wireless headset on a wireless network. Sound quality was poor. It's OK with the built in microphone, but can't recommend it except as a cheap way to skip phone charges when away from home for brief periods.

[Neilk]

I got Vonage for my parent's house in France. The sound quality is pretty decent when they call me on my landline at home, but for some reason sucks on my Sprint cell phone. The great thing about it is free calls to France. We have saved a fortune on phone bills.

If my parents (mainly my mom) were more adept with PCs, we'd drop Vonage and rely on Skype. The skype to skype call quality is amazing and SkypeOut works really well too.

[FrayAdjacent911]

I got Vonage at home about three or four months ago... works great for me so far. My internet service is through Time Warner. My cable modem was acting up recently, and I went to get it swapped out, still messed up. Finally a tech came out and got me another new modem, and it works fine. It's actually faster than my previous modem (old = 1.92Mbps av. new = 3.9Mbps).

The Vonage service is good, sound quality is fine, and I like the features. Sometimes, though, the voicemail dialtone/indicator thing doesn't reset for quite a while after I delete a VM. Also sometimes it's very slow getting to the voicemail page. Also the audio files you download of the VMs can be very low volume.

I picked up a set of Uniden phones, one of the ones that lets you have up to 4 handsets on the 'network'. Display with CID and all that jazz. Works fine so far. I also use the 'Simulring' so that it rings my cell phone simultaneously when someone calls my home number. Works great. I did disable the VM on my cellphone to keep it from picking up and preempting the Vonage mail.

I think some people are having problems due to not enough bandwidth or quality of service issues, as well as probably having the box too far 'behind' other network devices. My setup is cable --> cable modem --> VoIP router --> phone/PCs. It would NOT work if I tried to have my other router between the VoIP router and the cable modem. No biggie, I just set up my port forwarding and everything works like a champ.


I'd recommend it if you have a good, quality broadband connection, and use the VoIP router as your router, or at least the first device after the cable/DSL modem.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Mine goes modem -> wireless router -> Vonage box. I wired mine backwards, disconnected the landline at the box and just plugged the Vonage box into my phone jack by the computer. All the phones and phone jacks in the house work normally. The claim to not recomend this, but it works fine for me.

[masraum]

I work in networking. I provide VoIP services over satellite connections and leased lines to everything from remote offices, sat dishes on trailers in BFE, ships at sea around the world, etc. One of the guys that I work with who's a serious Cali techy dude did a bunch of research and ended up going with www.broadvoice.com. He's very happy with his service, I haven't specifically asked about quality. He likes the features that it has. I'm confident that he made a good choice. I work with several other people that have gone VoIP. It's a decent technology.

Wayne, on the matter of the bandwidth. I haven't researched exactly, so you may be correct, but at my work we use the G729 codec which reduces a voip call to where it uses about 25k of bandwidth max but with other options can get down to half of that. The voice quality is pretty much as good as a landline. The 62k that you are talking about is probably G711. I really can't tell the difference because the speaker on most phones isn't good enough for me to hear the difference. I'd expect most places to use G729, but they may not.

I too am still on a land line.

Originally posted by Wayne at Pelican Parts
Normal voice calls take about 62Kb/sec of bandwidth, or about 1/24th of a T1. With cable up/down of 2500K and 750K, the 62 is neglible on connection speed.

However, if you have an application that is download heavy (like streaming video, or file sharing), then those programs can eat your bandwidth, including the 62K. The solution is to setup QoS (Quality of Service) routing so that the phone gets the highest priority. The LinkSys WRT54G router has QoS, but I've never been able to get it to work properly.

I use a proprietary VoIP phone system here at home that is made by MCK and allows me to place a company phone in my home office. I have access to all of the functions of the entire phone system (pretty cool). But Adelphia cable sometimes drops out for a few seconds (unnoticeable when surfing), but a problem sometimes when talking. I fear this will always be a problem with these phones - they will never be as good as a point-to-point copper connection.

I still keep my land line here at home, as I want to have 911 access, and phone access if the power goes out, or my Internet tanks...

-Wayne

[slakjaw]

If you put your cable modem and phone box on a UPS battery backup. Will you still be able to make calls if you have a power outage?