[Promotum] New toy-voip

[Edmund A. Hintz]

Just setup Vonage for our home phone. Had to beef up my dsl, had a 128
up, changed it to 256. Might go to 384, not sure yet. The Vonage system
consists of a Cisco ata-186 which does the anlog-digital conversion, and
the service itself. So, we use our existing phones, and our voice traffic
routes via the dsl to vonage and then into the POTS network. So far so
good, but I expect I'll need to setup some smarter routing. Under my
current system if somebody hammers my webpages or something it can affect
my outbound voice traffic, I'll have to get a better router setup in
front of the dsl one. Wouldn't be an issue for somebody who isn't running
servers over the same network though. Also, since I'm dsl I'll still need
to keep my analog line. But, I can dump it to the bare minimum + call
forwarding (about $13), and all our phone traffic will be over the
network. Vonage charges a flat rate $40/mo for unlimited calling within
the US and Canada, so there's $53 there and then the dsl costs of around
$85 (dedicated statics are why it's more than the cheapo accounts). I
averaged out last years phone bills, and it came out to about $140/mo, so
now I'm paying a flat $138 and getting unlimited calling and better
network speeds. Nice. Worth checking out if you're of the geeky
persuasion and already pay for broadband-esp. cable since you could
completely kill the analog line. Also, since it's network based, you can
take the ATA with you wherever you go, and as long as you've got
broadband people call the same number as always. If we move to NZ this
could be a huge plus, since we'd not have to pay international rates for
calls back home. And we could setup multiple local numbers in the US for
$5/mo each so that when folks called us it's a local call for
them(although if they're paying US longdistance rates to call NZ it's
still a huge savings).

Shameless plug: if you want to try the system out let me know. I can give
you a referral, and we both get a free month of service

http://www.vonage.com

Regards,

Ed Hintz
ed@hintz.org