Ask the Readers: How to Choose VOIP Telephone Service?

I tried Skype last year, and would not recommend it as a replacement but only as an additional possiblity. My long distance calls (from Ohio to New York) were often dropped. This may be improved now–I stopped using it.

I have Comcast Digital Voice, and while they stress it is not “internet phone” it is indeed VoIP broadband phone service.

I don’t know what a ridiculous price is, but we pay I believe $19 a month for full services (voicemail, caller ID, call waiting), unlimited national long distance, and plus you don’t lose emergency service availability and such like with Skype. It’s modem box has a big battery that can do 2 weeks standy, 8 days talk without power too I believe. It’s a cheaper and more robust option than our quickly-growing QWest bill was.

I have had Vonage for a couple of years now. The only issues I have had with it is if someone on the network does any intense downloading, the quality of the call goes away like losing signal on a cell phone. If the power or cable service go out… you lose your phone completely. A cell phone can be used in this instance.

I love the call forwarding features on Vonage and the voicemail features. For voicemail, I have a .wav file forwarded to my email of the messages. I don’t ever call my voicemail anymore. If only I could listen to the .wav’s on my iphone.

I use Skype daily for out going calls and for audio conferences with other Skype users. We have also used Skype to record a 4 way podcast and it worked great. I would highly recommend Skype.

Keep in mind that with VOIP you won’t have phone access if the power goes out. That may not be a big deal some places, but I live in Florida, where we can lose power for days or weeks after a hurricane, so that’s not a risk I’m willing to take.

I’ve used Vonage for 2 years now and love it. The quality is the same as my old land line. My only real complaint is that once every 2 months or so, I need to reset the router by unplugging it for 30seconds.

Further, my inlaws live in canada and we were able to get a second local canadian number. Now they can call use for the price of a local call. I get it all for $30/month, flat.

I’ve had Vonage for the past 3 years. I’ve never had a problem with it. Quality is the same as a land line except I get free long distance and a ton of features. The only downside is it is solely reliant upon my internet connection, so if my connection drops (which isn’t often) my phone drops. Plus if someone would like a referral, we’d both get a couple months free.

I use SKYPE and highly suggest that everyone check it out. It is dirt cheap and the call quality if excellent.
I also like the features and plug-ins that allow me to utilize it for other purposes such as podcasts and radio shows.

I have had Vonage for over a year and we LOVE it. We’ve used it with Comcast Cable and Verizon DSL. We’ve never lost a call, and if ever there is static, it’s the cell phone we are talking to, not us.

The worst thing in setting it up was trying to explain to Verizon that we wanted a Dry Loop so we could have DSL, but no landline phone with them. They are so dumb.

You can try this site: My VoIP Provider

http://www.myvoipprovider.com/

I’m in the industry of testing VOIP systems. Let me just point out one thing no one has mentioned yet. When you use third-party VOIP services like Vonage and Skype, traffic shaping is not as affective as using a VOIP service from your high speed internet provider. When getting VOIP from your provider (i.e. Charter, Comcast, etc.) the cable company puts a priority on VOIP packets to improve the call quality and lessen the chance of dropped calls. With a service like Skype, if you’re downloading files or streaming other data while using the “phone”, the call quality will be impaired.

Hope this makes sense.

I’m another fan of Vonage. I think it works best if you have a cable Internet connection; I’m on DSL and sometimes feel my connection suffers for it, but overall I’m very happy. The big caveat with regard to Vonage is that they have been fighting (and losing) enormous lawsuits from Verizon so I don’t know whether they’ll be able to stay in business long-term.

The number 1 feature that sold Vonage for me is the ability to have a local phone number in another state, province, or country. It costs a small extra fee to do that, but because all my colleagues and clients are in Washington DC and I’m in Montreal, I set up a local Vonage number in DC so they can call me for free; it’s a local call for them but it rings here in my office in Montreal.

The number 2 feature that sold it for me is unlimited international dialing to countries where Vonage operates. My girlfriend’s family is all in France, so she can call her parents and talk for an hour or more every day if she wants, it’s all included in the monthly fee. My clients and family are all in the US, so same deal for me.

I also love the fact that Vonage sends you voicemail messages by email — it’s great when I’m traveling for work and have my computer; I get my voicemail along with my email.

This is about safety, not about the cost-effectiveness, but something to keep in mind about VOIP services when choosing one:

SO IMPORTANT: Be sure you read and understand your VOIP’s 911 protocol. For example, Vonage will program your phone to call your local primary answering point (usually your local police department who then decides to whom to shuttle the call) so that if you dial 911, your address will be instantly displayed, as land-lines do. This is good and safe.

But it’s truly dangerous how many people don’t understand that 911 is NOT a great big answering room in the sky. VOIP lines are portable, obviously, and people often forget to tell their service where they are located AT ALL TIMES. If you travel with it or move, you have to tell them (and don’t tell ‘em I told you, but you might want to consider dialing 911 and telling the dispatcher you’re testing the line, although police may show up on your doorstep to make sure you’re okay).

As a 911 dispatcher, I frequently get misrouted calls because of this. Recently my center got a caller who was reporting a person having a heart attack. The call came in to us, because it showed a Fremont, California address. But the person was actually somewhere in Pennsylvania, and didn’t even know what town she was in, let alone the exact address. Dispatchers do NOT have lists of other agencies’ phone numbers at their finger tips — usually they only have numbers for the closest cities to them. We have to do what anyone else has to do — roll our chairs over to the internet and start trying to find phone numbers for far-away police and fire departments. While one dispatcher is on the phone giving medical instructions, or getting the description of the man with the gun, the rest of the dispatch room is tied up trying to locate the right department, in the right city, in the right state.

Lives can be lost by not fully understanding this. VOIP is great, if used right. But it has to be understood.

Consider this, too: In California, any land-line plugged into any telephone jack, whether or not there is service active on that line, is able to dial 911. This will always convey the right address to the right department. Think about keeping that old rotary plugged in for emergencies.

(And while I’m preaching 911 safety up on my soapbox here, make sure your cell is programmed with the 7-digit emergency number for police AND fire for each jurisdiction you regularly travel through — dialing 911 on your cell will often route you to highway patrol where you can be on hold for up to fifteen minutes before they answer and route you to the right agency (who would have answered on the first ring if they had been called first) Someday GPS will be working for cell phones in the right way, but it’s a far-off day).

I just recently wrote an article that describes how to Utilize VoIP and get unlimited FREE incoming and outgoing calls.

All you need is a computer and an internet connection. Great quick and easy solution.

I’ve been with Vonage for almost four years now, and the money I have saved has been worth it. But to be honest with you, I will be switching away from Vonage the next time I have a problem with it (so probably in a month or two). Why? Because the next time I have to talk to someone in India whose only way of helping me is reading off his cue cards of common problems, I will be done. I have to call them once every few months, and every time, I get more and more frustrated and wonder why I even bother calling.

In fact, the only reason I am reading all these comments is that I’m hoping to find my new VoIP provider from one of you…

If reliability is a big concern, then I wouldn’t fully throw myself into the VOIP-world. Make sure you have a backup (prepaid cellphone or whatever). Most VOIP providers (vonage, viatalk, etc.) allow you to set up a backup number just in case your VOIP line isn’t responding. So if your internet access goes down, the call can be automatically be forwarded to your cell phone. Hell, you could even set it up easily so that whenever anyone calls your VOIP number, it could simultaneously ring your home phone (VOIP) and your cell phone. Whoever picks it up first gets the call.

FWIW, we moved our home phone to Vonage 4 years ago (or so) and have been very pleased with it. Even on those occasions where our internet access is down, we’re covered since it forwards the calls automatically to our cell phone.

good luck.

For what it’s worth I’m using Ooma (www.ooma.com). I like the system. The hardware is sleek and easy to setup and the call quality is as good as my cell phone.

The device costs $399, but there are no additional costs after that. The device offers free nation-wide long distance for “life”. The fine print actually promises at least 3 years of service.

I was one of the beta testers – so I got mine for free. I actually have a few Ooma White Rabbit tokens left. Not sure if they are still honoring them though. One could try.

There’s been a lot of controversy over Ooma’s peer-to-peer model, but for me I don’t view it as much of a security risk.

Just my 2 cents. Your opinion is sure to vary.

I currently use a combination of Gizmo and Grandcentral for free. It’s kind of fiddly to get it working but it’s been solid, great voice quality, and great echo cancellation.

Once Grandcentral begins charging, I’ll seriously consider one of the SIP providers associated with Gizmo. They advertise phone-in for $3/month and phone-out for under 2 cents a minute.

I’ve been using Skype for about 4 years, I’ve never had a problem, I use it as my main phone. I can call Canada to the UK for a penny a minute. It’s crystal clear, I have a UK SkypeIn number so my friends in the UK without Skype can call me at local rates. I would recommend investing in a decent headset. I’ve tried Gizmo and Wengo in the past and didn’t find them as good, but that was a few years ago and they may have improved.

I’m with a company that hasn’t been mentioned yet, so I’ll just throw them out there: Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.net). We’ve been getting our DSL through them for about six years, since our last house in Atlanta, and started getting VOIP with them when we moved to Pittsburgh two years ago. We’ve had bar-none excellent customer service experiences with them, although my impression is that they cater to a pretty tech-savvy audience — I’m not sure how they’d be for someone who doesn’t know anything about routers, etc. I suspect they’d be OK, though. The connection is fine unless there’s heavy network usage; most people don’t seem to be able to tell we’re on VOIP. Not sure how their price compares as far as apples-to-apples with other VOIP providers because we have higher-than-average networking needs and it’s all bundled together with our internet.

We were previously with AT&T Broadband and left them — and television service entirely, in fact — because the customer service was wretched. (At one point they actually put my husband on hold and then closed the customer service call center.) The level of incompetence we dealt with there was startling. Avoid.

I’ve been using Vonage for about 6 months on Verizon FIOS without any outages or quality issues. Basically, it just works and we have totally forgotten that we are really on VOIP. It just works! Isn’t that what you want.

Vonage has just a couple of straightforward options, and that is a good thing. For most every plan all of the services that a regular phone company will charge extra are included, e.g. voicemail, caller ID, call waiting. I have their $15/mth 500 min. plan, of which we typically use 60-80 min. That’s clearly not what the original poster is looking for but others may find it appealing like we do. The thing I like about this plan is that Vonage has a quite reasonable rate for overage minutes (NOT at all like cell phone plans), basically we would have to be regularly using 750 min. to justify the extra $10/mth for the unlimited plan.

I also concur with the many other comments about voicemail messages sent email — it’s great whenever I am away from home but using a computer, i.e. at work.

Also, we really appreciated the call forwarding that is included. When we go on vacation we forward all calls to our home phone to a cell phone, if we don’t answer on the cell phone the caller leaves a voicemail.

A note on faxing over VOIP. Vonage will sell you another dedicated FAX line, but I have found this to be unnecessary. I can send faxes over a regular Vonage line, BUT I have to crank down the rate from 19k to something like 5-8k. I use the fax modem in my computer send these faxes, as many regular fax machines don’t have this option. Sure it’s a lot slower, but for sending one fax every 3 months it’s fine for me.

Another poster, Jeff J. Snider, mentioned calling Vonage customer service. I do agree that when I had to do that it was not very helpful at all. I had a little bit of trouble getting Verizon to allow my phone number to be transfered and Vonage wasn’t very good at helping the process along, but it did get resolved after a couple of weeks. But after the initial setup I’ve never had any reason to call customer service. Like I said at the beginning, “It just works!”

I’ve used Vonage for quite a few years now (early adopter). I absolutely love it. They have two individual account tiers (they have Business, too), of which I use the cheaper (500 minutes domestic/Canada) which is $14.99 per month. Their unlimited “domestic” plan is $24.99. They even have international plans.

Vonage VoIP is great! Your setup involves plugging in a box to your cable company’s coax cable, plugging in your phones, and calling.

It’s that simple. You can keep your existing phone number. Keep in mind, though, that the local phone company can take weeks to make the switch for you (mine took 20 days way back when).

There are some caveats. Vonage, unlike Comcast’s VoIP, does not have batter backup. So, power down, phone down. Buy a battery backup. You should have one for your computer already, so you can plug into that.

Emergency service. When you sign up with Vonage, they request your home address. They use this for their “911″ calls. There are 3 ways Vonage’s 911 works, but the bottom line is that you will be transferred to your local 911 dispatch.

If your cable connection is subpar, so to will your voice calls. Get that fixed and your calls will sound *just as good as a landline.* Vonage has a QoS feature where you can set the priority of voice calls OVER other data (your “internet”), so when you make/receive a call, it takes precedence over your data uploads/downloads. You really won’t notice a big difference on your download/upload speeds, by the way, unless you’re big into bitTorrents or the such.

***Shameless plug: I can ‘refer’ you and you can get 2 months free.***

Some really cool features. Everything you can get through your local landline provider (call waiting, forwarding, voicemail, remote voicemail, voicemail as email, call transfer, call waiting, etc — 25 features altogether) is included with Vonage. I especially like being able to retrieve my voicemail via my computer, away from home. I don’t have to pick up the phone at all.

Another really cool feature: If you travel, you can take your Vonage “modem” with you and, as long as the place you’re staying in has broadband, you can receive calls there from people calling your home phone number.

One more cool feature: Virtual phone numbers. It’s not free but here’s how it works: If your parents, say, live in Boston and you live in Bakersfield, you can get an additional number in Boston. When your parents call you, they’re making a local call.

As you can tell, I’m a big fan of Vonage. I’m quite sure all the others are good too (Comcast and Packet 8 come immediately to mind, though I’ve heard that Skype presents problems, mostly in terms of call quality).

In the next few years, I predict most phone calls will be carried over broadband. It’s that good.

I have been using MagicJack for about two months now. It is only $40 for the first year (including equipment) and $20 a year after that. It is for unlimited calling in the US only but you can purchase minutes to call outside of the US. I am not a heavy phone user and it has been fine for my limited usage. The call quality is good (not great) and people on the other end have told me that it sometimes echoes. I only have two complaints with it. First, after dialing a number, it waits between 2 to 15 seconds to dial out. This can be really annoying if you are in a rush to talk to someone. Second, they have horrible customer service. I ordered my MagicJack in the middle of December. On their site, it says that you will receive it 4 to 10 days after it is ordered. I completely forgot about my order due to moving and Christmas and New Years. In the beginning of January, I logged into their site and saw that my order just said “Pending Billing.” There is no phone number or email address to contact them. I finally found an online form to fill out with questions. They took several days and then responded. A few days after that, it finally shipped. Even with annoying call delay and the bad customer service, the price more than makes up for it.

I have had no issues with VoIP, once I re-did the work of the Comcast installer. The price is too much for how little we use the phone. We are switching to Magic Jack as soon as the equipment arrives. Regardless of the customer service, the price is enough of a reason. I spent quite a bit of time researching, especially when I wrote about it here.

Lauren,

As has been demonstrated by the variety of comments here, your mileage may vary.

A variety of services, with a variety of configurations, have been recommended… from Skype, to Comcast Digital Voice, to Charter, to Vonage…

Let me give you a short background. I use Skype on a daily basis to talk to my Canadian fiancee. And in the house where I live, we have used both Vonage and Comcast. We are currently on Comcast Digital Voice.

My previous job was working for a startup company that provided VoIP service to small business, and we used the open-source program called Asterisk to run all of these services on.

This means you have the ability to download free software, and set up your own phone system in your home or business.

The part that you need to pay for is called a SIP service. They provide you with your phone number and connection to the phone network backbone.

Enough of the technical information. The simple reality of VoIP service is this… it rarely, if ever, approaches the voice/signal quality of an old-fashioned analog phone line, like you currently have.

The closest I’ve ever seen VoIP come to analog quality, is by using Cisco equipment which uses propietary technology for the mechanism that compresses your voice into digital ones and zeroes, and decodes it back into the voice that we hear on the other end.

Generally speaking, Cisco is *expensive* stuff. Vonage, Skype, Comcast and the other offerings, no matter how hard they try, can’t approach the actual quality of a plain old analog phone call.

If you are truly concerned with voice quality, I would recommend you find another analog provider if you have the option… either that, or invest in the Cisco equipment.

It is expensive, but if this is business-related, I wouldn’t skimp, because as is often repeated here… it’s often more expensive in the long run to go with cheaper options.

Cheers.