Looking to get a dedicated line for the business, rather than relying on my personal cell phone (that way I can answer with the business name instead of 'Hello?')

Not interested in regular telephone service, and was looking at Vonage. Their 14.95/month plan looks great on paper..

Does anyone have any real-life experience with Vonage? Would you recommend them? If not, do you recommend an alternative?


Kevin

Been a subscriber since January 2005. No complaints about the quality of service from this end. I find it cheesy that there is a $10 charge to change service plans, but I've done that just once since I turned the account on.

They've had a couple lawsuits slapped on them recently that they've lost, and just recently a third Telco sued them and looks to win for BS patent infringement. So I'm no longer certain that they'll be able to survive all these bogus suits.

Yeah - Reading about the lawsuits is what prompted me to ask here and see if the service quality has gone down because of them..

No, absolutely no change in the quality of my service at all. It helps that I have Verizon FIOS with 2Mbit upload and 5Mbit download, though. My parents have Comcast with 6Mbit download and ~384k upload, and there is a noticeable call quality difference.

I've got the largest residential plan available here (4 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up). Is the call quality at your parents' poor enough to justify a landline telephone? I get a decent upload speed here (470 Kbps), so it would be better than 384, but I'm worried that it will be bad enough to annoy me....

Comments anyone?

No, it isn't that bad. Also, they don't run ANY kind of QoS on their home router or even reserve bandwidth for the VoIP calls. I have a hunch that it would help a little since my father runs his computer 24/7. I have tested Vonage on 768k upload and it sounds fine.

Does the free (rebate) router offered by Vonage not include optimal QoS settings by default?

Kevin

I was given the simple unit that doesn't have router functions :). Normally the rebate one does QoS built-in.

http://voip.awsinternet.com/ is what I use. No complaints yet, I've had it for about a year now.

We've been using vonage at the house for roughly 3 years now and I have no complaints.

I just now discovered that DSL Extreme (my mother's DSL provider) has a newly opened VOIP sister company. Since she's had nothing but good things to say about DSL Extreme, I've decided to try their company out (The total order charge came to $27.61). At least this way I'm not shelling out $70 only to find that VOIP doesn't work well for me...

I have it for over a year. The only issue I had is last week for couple of days and it got resolved by itself! Overall, I am a happy customer.

I use Vonage (Canada) for business and personal use. Pretty happy.

2 years Vonage here with Comcast and no issues. There was a little bit of service degradation when talking but logging into the vonage CP you can set/limit the bandwidth usage if you are online doing other things. I also paid the extra $4.99 for the Toll-Free # and its been the cheapest I found(100 incoming minutes included).

A friend uses packet8, http://www.packet8.net a little pricey in my opinion but he runs a bigger Company and his runs more like a Full PBX system.

I'll stick with my Skype. I paid $30 for a year of unlimited Skype-to-Phone calling in the U.S. and Canada, and another $30 for a SkypeIn phone number.

For my wife's sake (she can't stand talking into a microphone), I made a one-time purchase of a Skype-ready cordless phone for $80.

Caller ID? Yes
Call waiting? Yes
Call forwarding? Yes
Voice mailbox? Yes
Conference calling for up to 10 people? Yes
P2P Chat functionality? Yes
File transfer? Yes
A whole bunch more crap other digital phone providers don't give you? Yes
Cheaper than all of them? Yes

:D

Works great with my RoadRunner!

2 years Vonage here with Comcast and no issues. There was a little bit of service degradation when talking but logging into the vonage CP you can set/limit the bandwidth usage if you are online doing other things. I also paid the extra $4.99 for the Toll-Free # and its been the cheapest I found(100 incoming minutes included).

A friend uses packet8, http://www.packet8.net a little pricey in my opinion but he runs a bigger Company and his runs more like a Full PBX system.
I think it really depends on where you want to call. The price difference between vonage and packet8 is pretty small, if you make many international calls like me the Freedom Unlimited Global is the better option. With vonage you get a free modem tho which is nice plus they have no setup fee.

does anybody here use packet8?

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007710220313

Inhabit, an Indianapolis designer and maker of modern home furnishings, hung up on AT&T three years ago. The nine- employee company switched from AT&T's small-business phone service to an Internet calling plan from 8x8 called Packet8 Virtual Office.

I've been with vonage for about 3-4 years also and have no complainants.

I was with vonage for 3 years - for the most part I did not have any complaints. We did have some problem when receiving calls - occasional dropped calls - echo - but over 95% of the calls were fine.
Price is another matter though - depending on what you need the line for look at les.net or another VOIP DID provider - that's the route we went, and we are much happier with the cost. You will also have more flexibility with hardware - with vonage you must use vonage kit. Our setup with a trixbox asterisk box and a few DIDs works very well.

Yep, been with them since January 2005 with two lines (two routers), fax, and two toll-free numbers. Been very happy with them especially when calling the UK and other countries from the USA. I have no problems when running through my DSL 384 UP/ 1.45 Down (quality is as good/better than home phone). If I run it through my cable modem 524/6.87 the call quality is not as good as the DSL even though the cable is faster (latency issues). Only issue I have is those junk LinkSys routers they gave me, which need rebooted every few weeks.

Friends of mine complained of low volume and noise when talking to me. ( I have vonage). My reception was clear and strong.
I installed a passive ethernet tap between the comcast modem and the vonage router and I did packet sniffing with Cain&Abel. With this setup you can record only "incoming" or "outgoing" packets (half duplex).I played back the recordings for "incomming" and it was loud and clear.The "outgoing" was relly choppy and weak.(that's what my friends complained about). I don't have a fix yet.

I will back the_pm on Skype which has worked pretty well with roadrunner.

I've had Vonage for several months now and I have nothing bad to say about them. I pay far less than it costs for a landline number per month, and have free calls to landlines in several countries.

Skype is a pain for me, because it requires me to either purchase a VoIP phone specifically for Skype or have my PC signed into the Skype application. I don't really want to do either, as I want my own choice of phone, as well as regularly running full screen or resource intensive applications on my computer that would interrupt Skype.

No doubt that Skype works well for some, I just can't see it as a realistic option for myself as it's a software based service (unless you want to buy a specific phone or other more expensive hardware) whereas Vonage is a more hardware based option that allows me to receive and send calls whenever.

The only downside about VoIP in general is that my uplink/downlink isn't fantastic, and I get alot of interference with both Vonage, Skype and other VoIP services if I'm doing something on the Internet. The solution is to temporarly disable my Internet applications or unplug my hardware such as my computer (I have a switch next to me at home) while making or receiving a call; though it totally depends on what my computer is doing and if I can stop it or not - for example updating anti-virus which can't be stopped short of removing the network connection but impacts on my calls.

My first experience with setting up Vonage wasn't fantastic - but that was because I purchased a phone that was completely fubar'd and I didn't know it - bad call quality, no caller ID etc. After I replaced the phone everything was great.

Admittely Skype is cheap in some instances with Skype Pro, Skype Out, Skype In, and Skype Everything Else. However it's just not "doing" it for me being so focused on software, and having few hardware choices. I seriously considered Skype at one point but decided against it after finding out that nearly every I talked to about it had Vonage and they said it was quite good.

Overall the Vonage service is great in my opinion. The only negative side is that don't go for VoIP if you have terrible upload or download speeds, or at least test it first. In regards to the lawsuits presented against Vonage; I purchased my subscription well after they started and knowing that they were there but it didn't really deter me from them. If they stop serving customers then that is something I will have to think about in the future, but at least I'll still be in the same boat as thousands of other people.

Hope that helps,
Best Regards,
Dark Light.

The only downside about VoIP in general is that my uplink/downlink isn't fantastic, and I get alot of interference with both Vonage, Skype and other VoIP services if I'm doing something on the Internet.
Get a router with QOS that will prioritize your voice traffic over everything else. You can then saturate your link and have no noticeable effect on voice quality. We have an office with 8 phones, an IMAP server (remote access to email), a ftp server and a VPN all sharing the 8 Mbps down / 768 kbps up link. Works well. If you don't want to run a full blown Linux box, get a router capable of running Linux. See OpenWRT, dd-wrt, etc.