I’ve been using Vonage for about a year now. Before that, I used Packet8 for a few months, but we had voice quality issues with them, and our Vonage quality is excellent. I’m on the $25/month plan, and the total bill each month is $27 and some odd cents, and that gets what I think is an unlimited amount of phone time (at least I’ve never been billed for more). That price gets all the features - call waiting, caller ID, call waiting caller ID, voice mail, forwarding, and even fax machines work. What’s more, when I travelled to the in-laws’ at Thanksgiving, I took it with me, connected to their Internet, and had our local phone line with me in their city.
It’s not that much of a bandwidth hog - the highest setting is 90 kbps, which is not a big bite out of my cable modem’s bandwidth. But you can also dial it down to 50 kbps, and I’ve played with this, with no noticeable loss of quality. I’ve also never noticed any interruptions when the computer is downloading/uploading.
It doesn’t matter too much what kind of router you have - the VoIP box they send you goes right after your cable/DSL modem, then your router goes after that. That way, the VoIP box can give the voice packets a higher priority to preserve voice quality. Some of the newer VoIP boxes they use have a couple of extra ethernet ports right on them, so you may not even need your router anymore.
Another thing I did was to disconnect my house from the phone company’s line. I did this at the box on the outside of my house where all the phone lines connect. Then I connected the VoIP box’s phone line to a phone jack on my wall, and now all the phone jacks in my house are available for the Vonage line. Note: you don’t want to connect the Vonage box to your house’s wiring if your house is still connected to the phone company.
Another nice feature, by the way, is that you get email notification when you get a voice mail message, and you can even listen to that message through your web browser, on any computer, by logging in to the Vonage site.
If you do sign up for Vonage, be sure to do so through a referral from someone else, since they (and I think you) get service credit for doing so. PM me if you don’t know anyone else to refer you.