internet phones

[Scott Shackelford]

I've had Vonage since 2002 when they first started. Originally we used it
for long distance and kept our pots line. About 2 years ago we ditched our
pots line (Verizon) since my wife and I both have cell phones and were never
using them. I would highly recommend Vonage as there are very reliable, but
only as reliable as your internet provider. Mine is pretty good
(Cablevision) as the fiber for it is right in front of my house. I keep a
dedicated UPS on the cable modem and VOIP box that will keep  it going for 4
or more hours. The cable company keeps there repeaters powered with battery
backups for nearly 8 hours in my area. (An engineer from Cablevision told me
this and I can verify that indeed during a power outage, I kept my internet
service.) Reliability wise, our phone service has been more reliable than
our neighbors who has Verizon and she ends up using her cell phone as she
constantly get cross feed of other lines or a nearby radio station playing
on her phones. Verizon has not been able to solve the problem for the last 3
years. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

I like vonage so much that I have it for my business as well. It's a little
different (you will not find it on there site as it's still on a pre-rollout
state) where I have 8 SIP VOIP accounts running into an Asterisk server. It
is a completely VOIP phone system. We have been running this for about 10
months and has been running great. Here however, we do have backup POTS
lines and faxing is still touch and go for VOIP. Some fax machines like it,
some don't. For a business, a POTS line I would recommend, but as long as
you have good cell service in your area, I would oust the local phone
company unless you want to keep a line for a lot of faxing or a dialup
modem.

Vonage is very good and has a great website to manage your account with. You
can even setup voicemail to E-MAIL a wave file of the message someone left
for you. You can also set up a number to forward to in the unlikely event
you internet is down. So you could setup you cell phone to ring your
incoming Vonage calls if your internet is down.

As a side note, stay far away from Packet8. Horrible customer service and
they go down all the time. Evidently they prefer to install upgrades that
crash during the day when everyone is on the phone. I don't have much
experience with "Truevoice", but to get a better ideal I would look around
the forums at http://www.dslreports.com/forums/all and search around and
look at other peoples experiences with them.

Now about E911. The E911 that VOIP providers has is NOT usually the same
E911 from a POTS lines. Basically it goes into a difference 911 call center.
However, in certain areas (like my part of NJ) they actually connect you to
the same 911 call center as if I was on Verizon. To the best of my knowledge
Vonage is the only VOIP provider that does this. Even then it's only in
certain areas as agreements have to me made between the local bell and
Vonage for it to work. However, what I would recommend is to find the local
numbers for Police, Fire, and Ambulance and post them somewhere and put them
into speed dial just in case. I would even recommend this to people with
regular POTS lines as 911 has been known to fail even on POTS line. (Ask any
New Yorker and they have heard the stories.) That should help with the
"wife" factor for those that it applies to.

99.9% of the time, you would never know you were on a VOIP line, but of
course, your mileage may vary!

	-Scott


-----Original Message-----
From: filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com
[mailto:filepro-list-bounces at lists.celestial.com] On Behalf Of Enrique
Arredondo
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 1:54 PM
To: filepro-list at lists.celestial.com
Subject: OT: internet phones

All of my neighbours are getting rid of their local base phones and
switching to vonage.com and paying just $14 a month for 500 minutes or $24
for unlimited local and long distance plus many other addons like caller ID,
email alert of phone calls, call forwarding,etc.... and the great thing is
that you take your current phone number with them!

It comes with the E911 which will work like the normal 911 service.

My internet cable provider is earthlink and they also started to offer a
similar product "TrueVoice" for the same price.

After seeing the Voip service in action with my neighbour, I'm going to get
it right away, but I'm wondering if anybody has any comments about
earthlink's true voice versus vonage service ?


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