I’ve been intrigued with the idea of dumping my local phone service through SBC and signing up with Vonage for phone service. I’d get to use my existing phone and could get the phone line, local and long distance calls for $25.00 without a bajillion taxes added on.
Does anyone have experience with Vonage or other voice over IP services? I know the quality is dependent on the broadband connection, but under good conditions are the calls free from echoes, delays, etc? Can people on the other end tell it’s not a regular analog phone?
Last September, I signed up with Packet8. The call quality was pretty good, not quite POTS, much better than a cell phone. But then it got worse, and intermittent. Often, we couldn’t understand what the person on the other end was saying. The voice mail was rudimentary, caller ID showed only the calling number, and often not even that. On the plus side, it was just $20 per month including unlimited calling anywhere in the US.
So we signed up for Vonage instead, about two months ago. The quality is nearly indistinguishable from POTS, it has a great voice mail system, caller ID shows both name and number, it’s reliable, and you can even use a fax machine on that line. All this for just $25 per month, including unlimited local calling and 500 minutes of long distance (which is a lot for us).
The Packet8 info talked about how their service doesn’t use much bandwidth, and the Vonage instead talks about how you need 90 kbps to work well. So I think the quality problems with Packet8 were that they were trying to put too much information down a low-speed path.