Hi all -- just wanted to offer a heads-up for anyone considering signing up for Vonage service who's searching the newsgroups for information. I just cancelled my Vonage service today (after having been connected for about two days now.) Reason? Well, the voice quality was pretty good, no beef there. The pricing, as anyone who's done their homework knows, is pretty outstanding.
Problem is, the Motorola adapter I received from Vonage sends my Internet connectivity straight into the ditch (slow to non-existent), even when it's NOT servicing a phone call (outbound OR inbound). The phone works fine, but surfing the net and checking mail became a dicey proposition at best. As a technical note, my adapter was placed between my DSL modem and my wireless broadband router (the setup designed to give phone calls priority.) I tried various sequences of resetting my DSL modem, the VoIP adapter, and my router, and none worked -- removing the Motorola from the equation was the only way I could restore good, fast Internet service.
When I phoned Vonage to cancel (which, by the way, left me very unimpressed, once again, with their customer service, especially the thick foreign accents and -- believe it or not -- the poor voice quality of the phone connection with customer service) the Vonage account rep actually told me that he personally had fielded a few calls *that day* regarding the very same problem.
Bottom line? Based on my experience this week, I would advise being very wary of signing up with Vonage *IF* you intend to use the free (after rebate) Motorola device -- it is abundantly clear to me that there are, at the very least, reliability issues with a signficant number of the recently manufactured units. I can't say that all VoIP adapters will cause problems, and want to make that clear. I also can't say that I have issues with Vonage voice quality -- it was about as good as I expected, given the nature of the signal delivery. But you may want to consider hardware options other than the Motorola VT1005 that they're giving away.
I hope that this info helps someone avoid annoyance similar to mine (it IS a nuisance to have to pack stuff up and return it almost immediately after having set it up.)
Skyline
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: I have been with Vonage now for about three years (since early/mid 2003) and find that what you are saying is sort of true with the older units as well. I cannot seem to do both (voice and data) at a speed I am satisfied with. If the voice is up there okay, then the data slows down, and if the data is okay then the voice quality drops. Originally I had it set up with the Vonage unit as one of the ports on the router (that was the way Vonage built them in the beginnning). I got a new TA from them which was built as you are familiar, with the TA in the middle, acting as a 'throttle' on the whole thing. That made the voice quality go up, but the data speed go _way_ down. Even with the newer TA, I wound up wiring it like a port off of the router again; that brought the speed back up but took a chunk of the voice away. Now I content myself with having the TA on a port and when on a phone call, I _stop typing_ and/or recieving data, since given my brain disease, I cannot do both at the same time very well anyway. But -- I have one computer here which is on line 24/7 -- a weather station -- and once each minute it sends its data via FTP to another site where it is available to the world and typically, once each minute on my voice calls the voice drops off a wee bit :( I hava a mini-PBX arrangement here, room-to-room calling as extension 1xx, dial '9' for local outside calls, dial '8' for 'long distance' (the Vonage line); the hangers-on around here are free to make calls to wherever they wish; I make _them_ do the '8' for long distance thing and let them complain about it; I generally dial '9' for both my local and long distance (wink!) or use my cell phone. But I have been thinking about dumping Vonage also if I can find one I like better. PAT]