Vonage voice quality - anyone have experience?

[jlshelton]

I'm considering Vonage for home telephone service.
Have any of you been using Vonage, and willing to comment about voice quality and service reliability?
If you are using comparable services (8x8, Lingo, AT&T's new IP), I'd be curious about your experience, too.

Thank you.

 

[Dexman]

From a cost perspective, there are various taxes attached to a wire line bill that VOIP providers are not required to charge. Some of these taxes, depending on your monthly usage and plan, can be a few pennies. The "Federal Subscriber Line Charge" runs several dollars. (The tax on my phone bill is $6.38) . A VOIP provider, for the most part, has less overhead than a typical LEC or cable tv provider, so they can charge less for their services. If you live in an area where wires are strung from poles and wires are cut or a pole goes down, you won't be calling your VOIP provider, you'll be calling, via some other means, your Internet service provider.

But voice quality issues, E911 service issues, the 100% dependence on your IP and the reliance on your power provider add additional places where VOIP service can be lost.

It's true that VOIP providers offer alternative delivery of voice calls during service disruptions, (such as redirecting calls to a cell phone), but, since outages may not be readily apparent, you would have to leave your cell phone turned on 24/7 to be sure you receive all calls. Even then, if you go the cell phone as a back up, you may still miss a call or two, depending on you cell phone provider's quality of service in your particular location.

Maybe someday, VOIP's transmission quality will be enhanced enough to make it difficult to tell a VOIP call from a TDM call, but, in my humble opinion, that's still a ways off.

 

[pmetzke]

I had Vonage for 3 days. I went through two of the PAP-2 adapters before cancelling all together. It worked for a few hours with each adapter, and the quality was real good. But then the adapters just died. I monitored them with a network sniffer, and they just stopped sending packets. It was weird.

After I cancelled, I signed up with Packet8. My only complaint with P8 is the lack of some features. I really like the idea of having voicemails delivered to my email box. I love the voice quality of P8.