dean

Are any of you folks using Vonage VOIP phone service at home? Are you happy with it? Martha ordered it the other day to save her company a few pennies (the company pays our phone and internet services). I haven't installed the equipment yet and I'm wondering what kind of a hassle using the service is going to be. It's no big deal for me since I rarely use the phone (except to hurl obscenities at telemarketers and poll takers), but Martha needs something that's reliable and hassle-free.

raymo19

A buddy of mine just switched his over to one of the voip companies, can't remember which one. He seems well pleased so far.

The only problem he encountered was that his old alarm system had to be replaced because it wouldn't work with the new technology. It required a copper tip and ring phone line.

You will need to keep a cell phone around if your ISP suffers frequent outages.

rbackhouse

I have had vonage service for about 5 months now. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. The quality is not up to the same level as a regular phone line but I'm willing to live with with cost savings (for me saving around $40 a month). The quality will be dependent on the quality of your broadband connection. This is very evident when I am downloading large volumes of data to one of my computers while trying to use the phone. Usually I just don't do both at the same time. Of course as the broadband services improve (they will just keep getter better with higher upload/download rates) so will the phone service quality improve.

You can get all your voice mail sent to an email address or you can acces it via the phone or the vonage website. The voicemails are created as .wav files.

BTW Vonage are offering a deal on a Wireless digital phone. You can configure it with your phone number and connect in via any Wireless Access point. So you can use you own phone pretty much anywhere that offers a WiFi connection

JonasM

I might consider them when they stop those commercials with the annoying music.....

JonasM

dean

My alarm system is wireless - two Beretta 9mms and five dogs who start barking when they hear a butterfly fart in Peru.

My ISP is pretty reliable, aside from the hurricanes we haven't had a problem with outages. The cable company ran RG-11 to the house, so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. I may also re-wire the house with RG-11 if I can find it in bulk at a decent price.

dean

The broadband router (LinkSys) from Vonage we got isn't wireless. Did we get the wrong router? We currently have a LinkSys wireless router which I guess I'll have to plug the Vonage router into, or does Vonage offer a wireless unit that will work better than my arrangement?

dean

I've never seen the commercials. What kind of annoying music? If it's Phil Collins, Billy Joel, Celine Dion, Britney Spears, or anyone else I can't stomach, I'm sending the damned thing back just on principle.

raymo19

Rapid onset lead poisoning is a very effective deterrent. Nice and loud too.

dean

It would be very rapid onset and very loud. Martha has a S&W .38. Anyone breaking into our house will think, if only for a split second, that they just stormed Normandy.

raymo19

You definitely want to avoid connecting the two routers together. That's going to be a very difficult endeavor and an unnecessary complication.

I'd check with Vonage first and see if they'll provide you with a wireless router.

If not, you should be able to use your existing router but you'll have to run the setup again or use the web browser interface on the router to configure it.

Another option would be to buy a wireless switch (looks a lot like your existing router without the Internet connection) and connect it to the new router. Then sell your wireless router on e-Bay.