I blogged a while back about my "Technojuggle" which was an effort to streamline the various gadgets and services I'm using, particularly focused around minimizing the number (if not the total cost) of bills I'm paying. The lynchpin in this strategy was being able to drop my land-line. Normally this would be no problem (e.g. cell-phone only), but I live near some sort of black hole from which cell signals can not escape. Unless it's cloudy, then it works sometimes. But it's not reliable, so I need a land line.
I've got plenty of bandwidth via my Comcast cable modem, so VOIP looked like a possibility. I chose Vonage, mostly because they had a good deal with Buy.com. As I wrote before, setup was a snap, and startup fees (after rebate) were close to zero. I've been using it for about 3 months now.
Thumbs up:
- As mentioned, brain-dead-simple setup. Great experience here.
- They moved my existing phone number and cancelled my land line for me
- Online administration rocks. That I can go to a website and set up or change my call-forwarding, call waiting, or voice mail settings is fantastic. You begin to think: why did I used to have to sit on hold and then pay for this stuff?
- Very little taxes. A $24.99/month service charge ends up being about $27, which I can deal with and is much preferred over the regular landline or cell-phone tax-o-rama.
- It just works at my house. Rather than plug a phone into the VOIP box, I just plugged the voip box right into the nearest wall jack, "back feeding" my system. It's important to make sure you've physically disconnected the land line from the system (e.g. at your phone panel) before doing this, but it means that all the phones in our house keep working like they used to.
- Voice quality is acceptable. Not worrying about long distance is nice. One thing you notice is that there is no pause when you pick up the phone until the dial tone comes on.
- I can now keep my home phone number forever, regardless of where I live or travel. For instance, when I go somewhere, I can just take my little Linksys VOIP box with me, plug it into the broadband at the hotel, and boom, it's my home phone. You can also use your computer for this.
Thumbs down:
- If you have a DirecTiVo (e.g. series 1 TiVo), or a home alarm system it probably won't work. The fidelity isn't good enough for a modem. I hear some people have gotten this to work, but I could not.
- Callers on the other end sometimes report a slight echo. I've heard this too, and it's slightly irritating, but not bad enough that people really complain about it, or mention it if they don't know that it's not a regular phone, etc.
- No way to block Out of Area, Unavailable, or Private calls. Some of the other providers do allow this.
- Every so often a number won't work. You'll either get an error message or a fast-busy. The latter usually clears itself up before long. It's happened maybe 2 or 3 times to me.
- No power=no phone. For safety you should probably have a cell phone available. There are 911 issues here too, meaning the link from dialing 911 to have the emergency services know exactly where you are calling from isn't perfect yet.
Wishlist:
- There's a pretty cool feature called "Simulring" by which my home phone and another phone of my choice (e.g. cell) ring at the same time. So I just now give out my home number, and it'll get me wherever. The downside is that if my cell phone is off, or at the bottom of a lake or whatever, that number will immediately go to voice mail, not giving me a chance to answer the home phone first. What I'd like is to be able to customize this: ring the home line 2-3 times, then start ringing the cell as well.
- The activity page on the website lets me see all the placed and recieved calls, which is nice, but there's some rough edges. What it doesn't show me is missed calls, and it also includes each Simulring (see above) or Forwarded call in the placed calls list. It would be nice to filter these out, since they're not calls that I placed.
- I'd like to be able to set custom behavior based on callers. Different rings maybe for different numbers (or unavailable ones), or the ability to send certain number straight to voice mail (a call screeners dream).
- I'd like to be able to customize the actual Caller ID info for a number. For instance, most cell phone numbers come up as "WIRELESS CALLER", which isn't that helpful. What I'd like to be able to do is configure this (much like you do in your cell) so that for some given number, it'll say "Shawn Cell Phone" instead.
But overall, for the price and flexibilty, you can't beat it.