VoIP?

[Hawkeye-X]

Has anyone have any experience with it?

[matcom]

1. ask me in about a month

we are moving to it :scared:

[ixion]

2. I have many friends using it...all have said good things

I don't want to get Comcast, so I don't have it. ;-)

[WeRQ4U]

3. I'm currently working on a case involving a local VoIP carrier.

THey are being sued by a large telecommunications company over end user fees and such. I've been reading FCC opinions for weeks.

[jobycom]

4. I use vonage. It's mostly good, but Vonage is a pain

I get some static with my connections, and a bit of fading in and out. It's a little worse than a cell phone, but usually the sound is as good as my old phone. With my Vonage account, I get free long distance, and the whole thing is 24.99 a month.

Couple of issues--your wall jacks won't work, so you'll need a cordless phone system that can add as many phones as you want. Uniden's 5.4 digital system expandable to ten units, for instance. Your 911 service won't work the same--you'll be connecting to a private service when you dial 911, and they won't be able to find you unless you give them your address. Read the instructions on that. It could be an issue if you have small children you are trying to teach about 911.

Otherwise, it's great, especially if you make long distance calls, and is the expense of buying phones doesn't negate your savings.

Vonage customer service has been a nightmare for me. Lighning fried out VoIP modem, and it took two weeks to get Vonage to accept that the unit was broken and ship me another one. Ran up a cel phone bell with tech support because it took an hour to convince them that the modem didn't work. And now they are billing me for the fried equipment. But their are other services, and I don't know if Vonage is that bad for everyone.

[Hawkeye-X]

5. My company is thinking about offering VoIP in our area..

and of course, we'd have to contract out with several telecommunication companies to get it set up..

So what are the pros and the cons of offering VoIP? What do users like or dislike about it?

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. I've had no problems with Vonage, and the price is certainly right!

About $28 for 500 minutes per month of phone calls anywhere in the U.S. or Canada, voice mail, call forwarding, caller ID, and a separate fax line.

For me, getting all those telephone goodies PLUS a dedicated fax line for about half of what I was paying Qwest for voice service alone was the real selling point. I had a fax machine that supposedly switched automatically between voice and fax, but it didn't always work right. Now I have it hooked to the fax line, set for Fax Only, with the ringer turned permanently off, and now I'm no longer awakened in the pre-dawn hours by faxes trying to come in from Japan.

I already had a cordless phone lying around. I have both a plain vanilla phone and the base of a cordless plugged in in the living room, and I leave the handset in my office.

I haven't actually used their voice mail, because unanswered calls are forwarded to my cell phone, where Verizon voice mail takes care of any calls that I don't pick up.