This week we signed up for Vonage. Vonage is a Voice Over IP product that lets you use your Internet connection to make your phone calls. We are very unhappy with our local phone service. Living in the sticks as we do now (Ha Ha Ha) we can’t get Verizon or MCI we have some crappy D&E service where they charge us 35 bucks a month to call across the street. We don’t get toll or Long Distance for a reasonable price. So on top of the 35 bucks a month, we paid 30 dollars to Zerocents for unlimited toll and long distance. I must say that was a great deal however Vonage is UNLIMITED Local and Long Distance for 29.99. That certainly seems alot better than the 65 bucks we’ve been spending!

Signing up was easy as pie. And we got a new phone number. You get to choose where you phone number is any area code any exchange. The sign up fee was not to bad just a months bill. They sent the Adapter via UPS very quickly. It was very easy to hook up but we did have a problem. Vonage suggests installing your Telephone Adapter outside of your router so that it can use it’s QoS (Quality of Service) function. This function is supposed to make sure that the telephone adapter gets the bandwidth it needs to function properly. However, when we did this and I tried to use iChat AV to webcam, the Telephone Adapter blocked all the bandwidth coming thru the router. I moved the TA behind the router and opened the appropriate ports and everything seems to be working well. The only thing we’ve noticed is that if you use the phone and are on iChat AV doing a video chat at the same time there does not seem to be enough bandwidth to do both and the Video Chat suffers. But this seems to be a minor issue and I don’t expect this to be a problem.

We cancelled our phone service with D&E and are now flying solo on Vonage. So far so good!