Vonage...

  • Thread starter englandshottest2
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englandshottest2

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anybody use Vonage, or something similar like the Tesco internet phone / VOiP??? What's the sound quality like??? Been wanting to get a Vonage line for sometime, as i think a landline is always best to have for any business...and no bloody contract like stupid BT!! :D, and I read you can have pretty much any area code (i.e. 01432, 01981) for your number, which is handy again.....but I wonder about calling mobiles....is that pricey still on those systems??
 
englandshottest2 said:
I read you can have pretty much any area code (i.e. 01432, 01981) for your number, which is handy again.....
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is that handy though? i dont know about you but if im browsing through a directory etc and the company claims to be local to me (i.e advertising in a local directory) but have a non local area code, ill discount them as either a chain etc, i.e if im looking for a local company ill be looking for a company with a local phone number
 
well i live in a teensey weensey little village a couple of miles outside of our 'city' (Hereford) so I think more people in the Herefordshire area recognize the Hereford number, rather than a village's...that's what i meant.
 
I used to have vonage but have now switched to the utility warehouse Internet Phone (VOIP but they don't like to call it that).

Quality on both is moderately good, the utility warehouse one seems to be of a more consistent quality, the vonage one had occasional poor and bad calls.

You mention using it for business. I wouldn't - but many do. I don't understand people making important business calls over a line of anything but the best quality. Especially when land line calls are so cheap today.

The utility warehouse Internet Phone call rates are at exactly the same discounted rates as the customer gets on their normal phone. Which for me and many customers is free for all landline calls.

I use the voip mainly for when I'm overseas. I take the box with me and plug it in to a broadband connection and I have my UK number and all calls cost the same as they would when at home.
 
Its worth remembering that when you sign up to a voip service you are sharing the bandwidth with a) you own traffic going out from your premises and b) overall traffic on the network that you are signed to.

In the first instance if you are online downloading/uploading any data then the voice traffic will share the data stream which could cause quality issues. Although many providers do prioritise the voice traffic it can still be affected.

In the second instance you are sharing bandwidth with the ISP's network as a whole. When traffic is particularly busy over the network you could suffer quality issues again, the same principal as above but on a larger scale. The way to partially ensure against this is to set up a VPN, but this is costly.

Personally i would stay with the old fashioned PSTN/ISDN service. When you make a call you have exclusive cabling to the exchange and then your own channel for the duration of the call.

If you do chose to go for a voip service then make sure that the provider is using the G.711 uncompressed codec as this is the closest to "normal" telephony. Many companies use the G.729A compressed codec, which while cheaper is also considerably worse quality.
 
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I use Vonage for business, chose my own area code & got unlimited UK landline / international calls for £7.99 a month. Call quality is identical to a conventional phone & there is no break-up even when mini-gub is killing things on the internet.


The only downside is if you lose net connection you lose phone & email.
 
thanks for that, hope you don't work for Vonage :D lol. yea the £7.99 plan sounds really kewl, also i read you can get some sort of American number that any USA clients can ring, and they only pay a charge as if dialing within their country (as my other business deals primarily with the yanks lol). yea our 'reliable' (cough!) BT business broadband is a bit hit or miss because we dont yet have 'cable' but soon as we do I'm hitting Virgin cable broadband :D, though if BT's ever down I just use my PDA phone as a modem to my laptop :D hehehehe.
 
englandshottest2 said:
thanks for that, hope you don't work for Vonage :D lol. yea the £7.99 plan sounds really kewl, also i read you can get some sort of American number that any USA clients can ring, and they only pay a charge as if dialing within their country (as my other business deals primarily with the yanks lol). yea our 'reliable' (cough!) BT business broadband is a bit hit or miss because we dont yet have 'cable' but soon as we do I'm hitting Virgin cable broadband :D, though if BT's ever down I just use my PDA phone as a modem to my laptop :D hehehehe.
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I'me on Virgin cable & wanted another line for business but by the time I paid extra line rental & phone charges the Vonage deal looked very attractive. The only downside could be if I want to move elsewhere I don't know if I can take my number with me :shrug:

I call my sisters mobile in the USA, it costs me nothing but she gets billed for a local mobile call. It works out at 10c a minute for her, obviously if she had a landline it'd be free :)
 
You can take your number with you where ever you go, thats the idea of voip. You may have to configure the number to log in/out though. If you have only used the number at a fixed location then you will not have used this facility. On the bottom of the ip phone there will be a MAC address, this MAC address will then communicate with the local router and gain an ip address. This ip address will then be paired with the phone number that you log in with. When a call is made to the number the call is sent to the ip address as data packets instead of digital signal.

When you are calling to PSTN you are basically going online until the closet point of presence to the destination phone, then over standard telephone cable. As it is difficult to trace the ip address to PSTN on calls and across networks, charges can be reversed. If you were making a call voip to voip this would be free, as you are communicating between the same protocol.
 
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