VOIP home phone systems

[Leo J Mauler]

On Sat, 24 Jan 2004 14:53:35 -0600 <kurt at verruckt.org> writes:
> Has anyone read up much on some of these new companies 
> like Vonage? www.vonage.com
> 
> It looks _very_ tempting. And _anything_that gets me away 
> from SWB is class a in my book.

It looks tempting.  But consider:

[1] SWB is behind all the DSL providers in your area.  And if you are
running Vonage through DSL, you are actually running it through SWB, who
is forced by law to sell service to its "competition".  So not only are
you not getting away from SWB, you are purchasing service from a company
with none of its own infrastructure, other than what it *leases* from
SWB.

[2] So you go with cable (if its even in your area).  I don't know about
your area, but in mine we've had the cable go out more frequently than
the telephone service (but less frequently than minidish networks).  More
to the point: I've *never* had the SWB phone service go out.  If you're
running Vonage through your Cable Modem, when your cable goes out it
takes your phone service with it.

Funny story: last January with the big Ice Storm the cable went out, the
electricity went out, but the phone service didn't go out.  So after a
day of no computer and shivering under blankets, I went out to the *car*
(and its working heater) with a long phone extension cord running from
the house phone jack, and a DC inverter, and had some dial-up Internet on
the laptop for a couple hours to check mail and update some websites. 
Then electricity resumed the following day (I was luckier than most).

[3] I don't know if you can do Vonage over Dish network Internet.  I'd
suspect the latency on dish network Internet would prevent Vonage from
being useful.

The thing about Vonage is that its "really cool" to be running your phone
service as VoIP, but if your goal isn't "to have all the cool technology"
and is just "to get away from SWB", you don't want Vonage.  The most you
can do to "get away from SWB" is to buy a wireless phone with lots of
minutes (Cingular RollOver sounds nice), get Cable Internet (trade one
infrastructure monopoly for another) and keep a stripped-down SWB phone
line with nothing but the most basic service for emergencies (my folks
stripped out tone service for a $1.50 a month savings, and without the
other bells and whistles you can have a $20 or less phone bill a month).

The only time I've ever used VoIP to make phone calls was back in the
late 90s.  A service called "DialPad" (www.dialpad.com) was free
(ad-supported) then, and I used it to make phone calls from the college
computer lab (carried a headphones+microphone headset in my knapsack). 
They've gone pay-for-service now, but they have some fairly nice deals on
prepaid VoIP.

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