VeeshanVault

Anyone familiar/Ever use Vonage VoIP for residential service?

Here's the situation...

A month ago and some ago(June 11th), I moved into my new house and had to run the gamut of service installs. Since this was a brand new construction, phone and cables hasn't been run to the house even though the cabling in the house was completely done.

Cable hadn't been a big deal. The cable guy came 2 days after we moved and although he wasn't the dude the buried the cable, he did run it from the pole to the house as I have TV/Internet. The dude that do their cable bueries will come sometimes in the summer. The only think I really have to watch out for is the cable when mowing the lawn.

The issue was with Bell up here. The contracting company that does Bell's line work in this area is on strike against Bell. This means that Bell is cunning on a very shitty contingency plan that give me absolutly no assurance of when my line is going to be put in. Get this, the only way he could've guaranteed me an install date was if I got another bell service with my phone, be it ExpressVu(Satellite TV) or Cell service.

Upon promptly kindly telling the phone monkey on the other end to go fuck himself with those other services, I setup my appointment and hung up with a phone service order and no idea when the shit was gonna get installed.

Fast forward to today and we're been running on our Emergency "Pay as you Go" cell phones. My wife used to talk to her family quite a bit before and now has had very little contact with em in the last little while. I got fed up with the situation this morning and signed up for Vonage VoIP since they are readily accessible and signing up was easy. I heard their support accessibility sucks ass however I don't plan on calling support much, if at all.

Anyone have any stories about em that they wouldn't mind sharing? (good or bad)

There have been some disturbing stories about Vonage users being unable to get through to 911 from their homes. I have heard anecdotally that Vonage has addressed this issue, but 1) this was in the US not Canada and 2) I haven't read anything from Vonage that confirms this.

Otherwise it's a great deal financially. In addition, I've used Vonage service at a friend's home and have used VoIP phones for business and the call quality tends to be as good as POTS or better. I'm considering getting their commercial service for my business.

We use it at my home, and it works great. You don't even realize you're not using a POTS line.

I can't find the article at the moment, but the 9-1-1 issue has been resolved as of about 6 months ago.

One word of warning/note. A VoIP phone will not work without electricity. A lot of times if the power is out and you have a basic POTS phone, you can still get a dialtone. If you get a VoIP phone, you might want to consider getting a UPS for your phone/Router/Firewall/Cable Bridge/DSL Bridge.

We have a variety of APC UPS's at the office here with brand new batteries in em that got de-commed when we moved to Powerware systems. I should be able to snag one of em for about 20 bucks or so =)

noel wrote:the 9-1-1 issue has been resolved as of about 6 months ago.

That's still a work in progress but it's getting there. It won't be perfect due to the nature of VoIP.

It's a pretty nice service overall, as long as you don't mind the infrequent, usually short outage. In addition to power as Noel mentioned, you're dependent on your cable company for your voice line to operate. Data service outages, oversubscription, script kiddies, etc.. are problems that could make calls choppy. As long as you've a cell phone as backup it's not a big concern IMO.

Got my VoIP router last night (finally), got everything setup, including the UPS and I am extremely impressed with the service thus far.

I called Bell Canada this morning to have the chick look at my order, go "Oh, there's no install date on this. The techs are off strike now, when would you like this installed?"

After biting my tongue very very hard for a few seconds to to rip into this pawn, I told her to just cancel the entire thing.

I havta say, life without Bell's bullshit is sweet.