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Vonage
VOIP Telephone Service Now that we have a decent and reliable high speed internet option in Deer Creek Farm (thanks to Airwave Access), I have been testing the Vonage VOIP Telephone service. VOIP (Voice Over IP) means that you use your internet connection to make and receive phone calls. It is substantially cheaper that normal Qwest service, and provides many options including call forwarding and voicemail. Vonage provides an adapter which connects to your internet service, and allows you to use any regular phone. No special phone hardware is required. They have 2 rate plans, the main difference is the number of long distance minutes included. You can get a phone number in the 303 or 720 area code, so to the outside world it looks just like any other phone number they may call. I have found it to be fairly reliable, but not enough that I'll be abandoning my regular Qwest phone service. For the past 2 months I forwarded all calls from my business phone to the Vonage line, and used it almost exclusively in my day to day business. The service works great, and most people couldn't tell that the call was routed over the internet instead of being on a normal phone line. The only problems I ran into were related to bandwidth. When I was surfing the web, or downloading a big file, the Vonage service had a tendency to become unreliable or to start sounding like a bad cell phone call with a lot of cutting in and out. This "issue" didn't happen all the time however. I suspect it's related to congestion on the internet as a whole, and not to the chunk of bandwidth that Vonage uses. That's my first impression of Vonage. I will be testing the service for another 2-3 months before making a final decision on it, and I will post updates to this article from time to time. If you have any questions about the service, check the Vonage site - they have good explanations on how the entire process works. Please feel free to email me with any comments or questions that the site may not address! January 2004 Update I closed my account with Vonage, and returned the equipment to them. I think that the service is an excellent idea, and it worked great as long as nothing else was using my internet connection. As soon as I started web surfing, or checking email, or downloading a file, the Vonage line became very choppy and basically unusable. This is no fault of either Vonage or Airwave Access, they're both great services. If Airwave ever offers a higher bandwidth option, I'll be signing up again with Vonage! April 2005 Update I have been using Vonage for the past few months with Qwest DSL, and it has worked perfectly. Vonage sent a router which prioritzed the voice traffic over data, so mo matter what I did with the computer, the voice call always had the bandwidth it needed. I highly recommend checking out Vonage or one of it's competitors if you're in need of another phone line and don't want to pay Qwest. |
