UPDATE: WE ARE NO LONGER USING VONAGE. IT WORKED WELL FOR US BUT WE HAVE DECIDED TO DROP ALL LANDLINES IN FAVOR OF CELL PHONES.It has been 4 weeks since we started using Vonage for our phone service. Here is a little bit of history--we started seeking the VOIP (Voice over IP/Voice over the Internet) option for phone when we were solicited by a company who hosts this website, Speakeasy. They said they could provide us with DSL. No other company would even talk to us about it so we thought we would give it a try. The money seemed to work out where we could actually save a few dollars. After having a technician come to our house and test line lengths, they determined that it was not possible to get DSL. At this point we had convinced ourselves that VOIP would be a good option and ended up researching Vonage. Most of my research found that people did not have very good service with Vonage. In fact, one story was how a family lost their phone number when it was somehow transferred from Vonage without their permission. Still, the $25 per month for unlimited calling to US and Canada seemed compelling to us. So, we purchased a Vonage kit from Sam's Club and increased our Internet speed with Charter Cable. I signed up for the service online and then hooked up the equipment once I was notified that we had been assigned a temporary phone number. It took me around 5 hours to figure out how to set everything up. Part of this was because we have a US Robotics Firewall/wireless router that is a bit challenging to configure. Hey, I got it as an open box from Walmart for $35 so I don't mind playing a bit. In the end, I set up port 1 on the router as a dmz port with a static internal IP address and then tracked down instructions for setting a static IP on the box we received in the Vonage kit. I think this would have been a bit easier if we were using a linksys router with the linksys phone connector that came in our Vonage kit. Anyway, once I had set up our equipment properly I connected up a phone to the phone plug and heard a dial tone! This was pretty exciting stuff. The quality sounded really good as well. I then disconnected most of the phone lines in the house from the telephone companies equipment and plugged in the vonage to the system and had all of our phones using the Vonage connection except for 1 while we waited for our phone number to transfer. The phone number ended up being transferred after about a week and a half. Now we have all phones in our house using the vonage connection. The positives: voice quality is usually really good, we can forward calls to other phone numbers, voicemails are emailed to us and we can also check them on the phone, we can see all incoming and outgoing calls on the Vonage website, caller id works just fine The negatives: it took me awhile to get the equipment working properly, sometimes we get a bit of an echo on the phone when we are talking. All-in-all, I am happy with the reliability and quality. I'll post more information as we have more experience.
