VoIP (Voice Over IP)

[sammm]

Has anyone taken the plunge and changed their home/business phone service to VoIP? Any comments, suggestions or recommendations are welcome.

[tailchaser]

Yes & Yes

There are a number of "good" services out there for home.

Big things to watch out for:

• Vonage, in particular, and many other services will let you port your number to them, but will not release your number once they have it. Be sure you're happy with any service before you port your number.
• VoicePulse (using them currently) has a great product. Their marketing is abysmal, as is their documentation. However, it works beautifully over Comcast. I understand there are some issues if you have DSL service.

Smaller (read: fixable) things to note:

• Some products (like Vonage) provide a router/gateway that goes upstream of your home router. This is nice in that their product handles QoS to ensure voice is always top notch. However, in practice, the devices appear to need a bit more firewalling, as they will lock up when they see Internet traffic they don't like. In practice, you'll need to set your Vonage gateway inside your home router to keep it reliable.
• Products that sit inside your home router will exercise your router in new and exciting ways. If you're router has never locked up or spontaneously rebooted before, it probably will when you add VoIP to the mix. I had to pick up a second Wireless router to separate routing tasks from Wireless as the DLink unit I have wasn't up to doing both.

I picked VoicePulse primarily because they offer phone numbers in my hometown rate center. That way, my parents can call me without paying for it. Only VoicePulse and Verizon offer local numbers there, so my choices were limited. VoicePulse also does some neat pony tricks like ringing my cell phone selectively based on who's calling, prompting callers to press a button if they really want to talk to me after 11:30 at night, and importantly, <30 seconds failover to my cell phone if my Internet connection goes down.

[redmenace]

...will let you port your number to them, but will not release your number once they have it.

That's legal?!?

[channelmaniac]

Make sure whatever service you pick provides 911 support and if they say they do, read the fine print.

[channelmaniac]

That's legal?!?

Well, look at it this way... even if it isn't legal they can still operate within the letter of the law to delay it the maximum amount of time possible. Telcos are great at doing that to discourage the competition.

[tailchaser]

That's legal?!?

So far... For some reason, the government folks find it more important to mandate that all PSTN interconnected VoIP providers provide e911 service than to make sure folks can keep their phone numbers when they depart.

Regulation is in its infancy for VoIP. If your phone puts food on your table, be very wary of VoIP. There's nothing to say that just because it works today that it will work in 5 minutes or tomorrow or next week. And if it stops working, caveat emptor. I don't have a particular problem with that, and a VoIP phone meets my employer's requirements of having a home phone. A couple of VoIP lines also reduce our firm's long distance bill to effectively zero and provide us with local numbers for clients in other cities.

[RX7-2nr]

im trying to get a job with Telemedium doing VOIP support.

www.telemedium.com