Vonage Broadband Telephone Service Review

Voice over IP is the wave of the future in landline communications. Are VoIP services such as Vonage really ready to challenge traditional telephony?

Summary

IP Telephony or Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) has been a popular tech news item lately. It is a service that allows users to connect to the telephone system with their broadband Internet connections.

 

With a few companies already offering the service, the big telecommunications companies are now starting to get involved. Vonage is a New Jersey based company that has been in the VoIP business for over two years.

 

In this review, we take a look at the service and packages they offer and tell you if it really is worthwhile to change over.

 

 

*Edit Feb 2, 2006 – The score of this review has been lowered from a 9 to accurately reflect our long term use and satisfaction. We recommend that you read the user reviews before purchasing this product.

Introduction

Many of you may have done the same thing my wife and I did more than two years ago – we went “totally digital”. We got rid of our POTS line (Plain Old Telephone Service) and decided we only needed our cell phones.

We had cable internet so there was no need for a telephone for dialup access. Since we were already paying for two cell phones, getting rid of that landline bill saved us over $40 a month.

But things have a way of changing. We had a baby and were home more often than before. We received and made more calls than ever before. That first month after our child was born, we had over $100 in extra charges because we went way over our alotted minutes. We’ve gone over by $50 or more twice since then. But there was no way we were ever going back to a landline.

Then I was presented with the opportunity to review the Vonage service. I had heard about it and had seen their ads all over the Internet, but never really looked into what they offered.

Could Vonage be the cure for our phone problems?

About The Service

Based in Edison, NJ, Vonage is a privately held company of over 200 employees. They offer VoIP service to over 100 U.S. markets and are steadily growing. They first started offering residential VoIP in April of 2002.

VoIP is a relatively easy concept to understand. The system uses a device to turn an analog voice communication made on a regular telephone to a digital signal that can be transmitted over the internet. Vonage has a PoP (Point of Presence) with telephone companies throughout the U.S. where that digital telephone call is forwarded on to the local phone systems and turned back into an analog transmission. All of this takes milliseconds to do.

The Voice Terminal connects you to the Vonage VoIP system.

The heart of the Vonage system on the client side is a Motorola VT1000 series Voice Terminal. The model we tested was a VT1005V. Think of it as a “reverse telephone modem”. The Voice Terminal takes an analog voice transmission from your regular telephone and turns it into a digital transmission to be sent over the internet. It then receives the digital voice transmission from the person you are talking to and turns it into an analog signal that your phone transmits through the earpiece. It is about 5.5” wide by 7” long and 1.5” high at its highest point – roughly the size of three CDs stacked on top of each other.

The VT1000 series Voice Terminal won a CES “Best of Innovations” award in the Small Office/Home Office category for the 2004 Consumer Electronics Show. After using it, we certainly can see why. The device hooks up to your internet connection via a regular Cat5 Ethernet cable. It then hooks up to your telephone with a regular telephone cable.

The Motorola Voice Terminal is the heart of your Vonage system.

 

There are several ways to hook up the VT1005. If you only have one computer, the VT1005 acts as a DHCP server that assigns an IP address to your computer. If you have several computers on a network chances are that you already have a router or switch, in which case you would connect the Voice Terminal to one of the open ports on your network.

The router functions of the VT1005 are not as robust as a regular SOHO networking router, but for a single computer it is more than adequate.

We tested the effectiveness of the router functions by making phone calls while performing tasks online on a computer connected directly to the VT1005 Voice Terminal. In our tests, we downloaded large files and played multiplayer games online while talking on the phone. Our download speed was consistently similar in three such tests.

We made many phone calls while playing online multiplayer games, listening to streaming audio and downloading files and voice quality was consistently excellent.

When we really hammered our cable connection with a lot of downloads