Vonage - questions on fax and Tivo and modem and overallquality.

Just curious, how many minutes a month are we talking about?

I just have a few pay by the minute accounts open with a few voip operators that charge 2 cents per minute with no monthly. For me that comes out to a lot less on average than the $20/mo. to $40/mo operators want. If you use 1000-2000 minutes / month, it may not be cheaper for you.

One other thing you may want to consider. If you are mostly calling one or two numbers it will be a lot cheaper in the long run if you just buy the people you call a hardware voip phone and then call that phone directly for free. For a one-time ~$60 expenditure you get to call them for free from then on.

Calls between two VOIP don't need a service provider. One phone can just call the other. It is only when you want to call normal telephone system that you need a service provider to gateway your calls into the phone system. Some of the for-pay place also will lock up your phone with passwords they don't tell you so you can't connect up to anything but their service. You of course won't be able to use phones attached to their system to make free calls to random VOIP phones on the net.

-wolfgang

I keep on forgetting that much of the US is still on dialup or carrier-pigeon. Sigh.

I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to mention that I just read that in Hong Kong one can get 100Mbit/sec ethernet to the home for $34/mo (US dollars) and 1-Gigabit ethernet to the home for $215month (US dollars).

-wolfgang

One thing to consider is that the party you want to call must have high speed internet service. I am in a position where I only call three number on a regular basis. Unfortunately, only one of these parties has cable internet service. One has dial-up and the other has no internet connection. The best I can do is to get a DID that they can call in on and use my VOIP service to phone their PSTN phone. It still works out much cheaper than my old conventional phone service.

I don't have Vonage, but I do have VOIP service. I use one that offers a pay as you go plan as well as an unlimited plan. I'm not a big phone user, so I end up paying a about $15-$20 a month as opposed to the $50-$60 a month I was paying with my old phone service. You may be able to do better than Vonage, especially if you don't use a lot of minutes.

I don't think you can use your fax modem to send faxes over VOIP. You may not have good luck in general sending faxes over VOIP. As someone mentioned, there are services that will take an email, convert it to a fax, and then transmit for you. That is how the fax service works with my VOIP provider, but I think they only do it for their business customers.

I guess I don't understand the issue with the TIVO.

I think your answering machine would work with your VOIP service. However, many VOIP adapters allow you to assign distinctive ring tones to particular number, block numbers, and do conditional call forwarding and schedule "Do not disturb." Probably all VOIP providers offer voice mail that is forwarded via email. Using a combination of these features, you can do rather sophisticated call screening. That is a reason why you might not want to use Vonage. You will be stuck with their choice of adapters and it will be locked. You won't be able to access it's features and should you decide to change providers, the box will be worthless.

If I understood the gist of the e911 issue correctly, the requirements are so slanted as to drive the SIP guys out of business. In the PSTN world each central-office has dedicated leased lines into all of the local 911 call centers that they would ever need to route call to. There are 650 of these centers in the US, but the local telcos only need to worry about connecting to the one or two that serve their customers. Now the sip guys have to connect to all of the call centers. On top of that, running 650 leased lines to each 911 call center is prohibitively expensive. Now I may have totally misunderstood the issues, so take the above with a pound of salt. Here is one of the references I remember reading:

If the FCC really wanted to make sure the public was best served, instead of making sure their good buddies in the telco got to drive SIP/pstn gatewaying companies out of business, then they would mandate that the e911 call centers accepted over-the-net SIP calls. Adding the physical address of each caller to the sip headers of 911 calls wouldn't be that hard. (Obviously one would want to have the address info cryptographically signed by some responsible organization such as the VOIP service provider.) Alternately the FCC could mandate that each ISP needs to keep a accurate, remotely readable real-time records of IP address to street-address. Adding that capability wouldn't be that hard either.

(The latter might also have a huge effect on spam. Imagine being able to get the snail-mail address of the 10,000 spammers that sent you spam last month. At $500 per pop, that would pay much better than just about any day job.)

-wolfgang

I've been there myself. I keep thinking how I can get everyone to switch to VOIP and then it occurs to me that they don't have a decent internet connection. I keep telling people without high speed internet that they could drop their expensive PSTN phone service and add high speed internet and VOIP phone service for what they paid for the phone line. I find people very skeptical and until the E911 thing is settled, the people I talk with are reluctant to switch to VOIP. I think that VOIP providers are dragging their feet on E911, only seeing the expense. I think that they would attract many more subscribers if they had E911, making the expense well worth the investment.

I also think that internet service is WAY too expensive here. There just isn't any competition and the prices are too high. I think that $25-$35/month is about right. That is significantly higher than the $45-$50 that is currently being charged by the likes of Time Warner and Comcast.

Thanks all. Got Vonage today and it worked very well. Notice an almost imperceptible amount of hum and static on some calls. Can live with it.

Even got a fax to go through with *99, as a prefix (via my PC and modem).

Will play with it for 20 more days and then decide if I want to keep it and kill my local provider thus saving about $480 a year. Got it for $62 (with tax included) and a $50 rebate I have yet to mail in (when done testing). Might hook to phone outlet in one of my rooms to service entire home after I disconnet local service ---or---- I may just buy a few 5.8 Ghz phones with extra handsets.

Patty

Did get a few dropped calls after talking awhile resulting in a busy signal. Hmmmm.. Patty

Are you sure about that?

According to the wikipedia, Hong Kong still has a separate set of laws from the rest of the mainland.

's_Republic_of_China The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China has passed an internet censorship law in mainland China. In accordance with this law, several regulations were made by the PRC government, and a censorship system is implemented variously by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and organizations. The project is known as Golden Shield. The special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal systems, and like most other laws this law is not applied.

-wolfgang

yeah, shame it comes along with gov't censorship. Speed's nothing if it can't be used freely. Same thing goes with carriers trying to block services.