Vonage / VoIP

[ChadTower]

I'm seriously considering switching to Vonage for land phone... anyone here use it or know someone who does? 

[locash]

I haven't tried it, but one of my co-workers has.  He thinks it's great.   He has family all over the country and Canada.  He gets unlimited calls and minutes for $25 a month.

[ChadTower]

Yeah... the ONE drawback I can see immediately is that if your net connection is gone, so is your phone... same with electricity.

[grueinthebox]

I don't use Vonage, but we have the Time Warner digital phone service which is likely going to be fairly similar functionally.  Have no complaints whatsoever - seems indistinguishable from regular phone service.  Our cable modem has been exceptionally reliable, so losing the connection isn't a big concern...  As far as the power goes, our only phones are cordless, which would be unusable if the power were out regardless of the line it's hooked to.  Wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.

[Hoopz]

I switched my office over to Vonage several months ago.

[Santoro]

I have Vonage for my work-at-home office line.

[brophog]

We've had it for about a month. Frankly, I don't use the phone very much, so I'm a poor comparison for most people. In the little use that we do use a phone though, I've had no problems whatsoever.

 

[Trenchbroom]

Vonage is alright--especially since Comcast "widened the pipe" a bit over the past year.  Used to have quality problems while browsing or downloading but no more.

It's definitely worth it for the cost savings.  Used to speand $20/month for dial up + $60/month for phone.  Now it's $70/month for phone AND cable modem. 

[DemonBrew]

I have Comcast cable and Vonage. I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. Almost every call, I get "one way audio" - I can hear them, they cant hear me. Happens about 2 minutes into the call, lasts for about 30 seconds (which is an eternity for those who aren't used to "my phone") then comes back. There's no static, pops, nothing. They just hear silence.

I've paid the $10 a month extra "speed boost package" from Comcast. I'm supposed to be getting 6 Mbps down and 768 kbps up. I have QoS set up on the firewall to give VoIP priority over everything, AND I even changed the "bandwidth saver" setting over on my Vonage account to 30 kbps (instead of 50 or 90). Still no change.

It would be nice as a second phone. Unfortunately, I don't have any other phones. They also took a long time to port my number over, I think it took like 8 weeks.

[Santoro]

AND I even changed the "bandwidth saver" setting over on my Vonage account to 30 kbps (instead of 50 or 90).

I think you might have done this backwards.

[DemonBrew]

AND I even changed the "bandwidth saver" setting over on my Vonage account to 30 kbps (instead of 50 or 90).

I think you might have done this backwards.  Vonage starts out at 90 kbps by default, which is the highest amout of bandwidth.  You probably made the issue worse by changing that setting to 30.

Do look at your phone too.  When I had the 1-way audio problem it was because the volume my phone (headset) was feeding the system was too high and would always overpower the other party's audio.  Try another phone as a test.

edit: another thought.
Cable modem is by design a shared bandwidth arrangement. I wonder if your neighborhood 'node' is maxed out in terms of capacity.  Are your problems worse at certain times of the day, say evenings? 

How could I have made it worse? Vonage's site even suggests it:

Try adjusting the bandwidth saver to either medium or normal.

Which is what I did - changed it to medium (50) then to normal (30) with no success.

I'll try the other phone idea. Thanks. I dont think that's it though - the call is normal for 90% of the call. It definately seems like dropped packets to me.

Yeah, I know about the shared bandwidth. I've tried several speed tests, but even if my upload only says 256 kbps, that should still be sufficient right? Problem happens any time of day.

[ChadTower]

Would probably depend on what protocol it's using... some consumer level routers can't handle UDP very well at all... I had a good one that would just drop 90% of incoming UDP, making it impossible to play online games.  Swapped it out with an older, more primitive one, and the games work perfectly.

[mr.Curmudgeon]

I had a good one that would just drop 90% of incoming UDP, making it impossible to play online games.  Swapped it out with an older, more primitive one, and the games work perfectly.

Wait! You play online games?  Did you hack a virtual boy and make it WiFi or something? 


mrC

[ChadTower]

Heh... When I was interviewing to lead up Turbine's Configuration Management, I bought and played a couple of their online games to get a feel for the product and community.