Best VOIP?

August 8, 2005 5:44 PM

In September, my wife and I will be moving to a new apartment in downtown Manhattan. We're viewing the move as an opportunity to upgrade the technologies we use every day in the house. So my question(s) are: Should we go with Voice over IP for our home phone? If so, which is the better service, Vonage or AT&T CallVantage? Along the same lines, for our highspeed network, should we go with TimeWarner Roadrunner or keep our Verizon DSL service? Any thoughts?
posted by marcschil to computers & internet (13 comments total)

I can give my experiences with Vonage. Both me and my gf have Vonage. We have had it for over a year now. So the good thing is V2V calls are free! The not so great experiences I have had are as follows.

I call India and calling India on Vonage is always a problem in terms of line quality and at times I get funny messages such as "your calling card has expired" !!! Hello!! I am not sure who Vonage uses on the other side to complete their calls. I do not know what are others' experiences with international calls. I need to use a regular calling card provider like Reliance India with a 800 number to do my India calls.

I seem to notice strange things about ambient noises on the line. When we are on the V2V call and one of us is doing dishes or have the sink running, the sounds get strangely amplified. We use the Vtech 5.8 GHz phones which I have used before with regular line. I never noticed this kind of irritating noises. My initial reaction is some kind of strange noise cancellation or amplication algo at work. May be somebody can tell me why this happens.

Sometimes even background music playing on low volume on a nearby laptop or something would come across as very loud.

The other problem along a similar line is when one of us is on cell phone and the other on V. There are drop outs where usually the person on cell would miss words and sentences from the other side. One has to shout once in a while to keep the line going ok. Here again I think the ambient noise of the car has something to do with it.

Strangely enough i make very few interstate or local calls to other numbers from my Vonage phone. I use my cell for most of those times. So I do not have much first hand experience to share.

But a colleague of mine who lives near by has not had much good expriences with local and national calls from his Vonage phone.

And of course when my Comcast conks out I am totally hosed and that DOES seem to happen more than I would like believe it or not. Then I need to call Comcast from my cellphone which does not have good reception in my home and they keep calling me back on my home number which is Vonage!! But Vonage lets you forward the calls. That is good. and their voice mail feature is pretty cool too.


So check others expriences here and make sure you have backup cell phones and some have told me I should see what is the cheapest regular line service I can maintain as a backup.

But my regular line has been dead for a while now I guess and I am not sure how much Verizon would charge me to activate it.

So if you do not need to then do not cancel your Verizon line or close the possibility of having one until you have had Vonage for a while.
posted by flyby22 at 6:17 PM on August 8, 2005

I have Vonage and love it. I had some static issues when I first got the phone. Oddly everybody sounded static to me, however I sounded fine to everyone else. I called vonage they changed a couple settings on their and it has been fine since then... 2 features that I love with my vonage account. you can set it up to email you the voice mail that people leave, and getting virtual numbers in other zip codes. I have a DC number and a western PA number that is local to my parents house both ring at the same phone.

If you are thinking about getting VOIP, you want to get a cable service. One advantage with voip is that you don't have to pay the phone line taxes, however if you go with DSL you will still be paying the taxes for the phone lines... Also on the lines of that, if you can get RCN I would recommend them... I have them hear and they have been very good to me....
posted by kashmir772 at 6:28 PM on August 8, 2005

i've been happy with Verizon's DSL, and they do a good deal if you commit for a year. (i have local phone with them)

Time-Warner i find to be very overpriced--basic digital cable is like $50 now.
posted by amberglow at 7:05 PM on August 8, 2005

Cable generally has better outbound bandwidth than DSL, and that can make a _real_ difference on a VoIP line.

I've got Vonage for my home office line, and I love all the bells and whistles--you can have a call to your Vonage line "simul-ring" on multiple numbers, like your main home line, and/or your cell phone, and/or your office phone, all at the same time. Caller ID comes through on all of them, and if the call goes to Vonage voice mail, you can get an MP3 of the message e-mailed to you. When we moved from the NY area to Ann Arbor, I was able to get a new Vonage number local to here, but keep my old NY number to ring on the same line, too.

On the other hand, you are hosed if your Internet goes out. I haven't ever really had that problem, but it's something to think about.
posted by LairBob at 7:45 PM on August 8, 2005

Slate tested a whole bunch of VOIP services and wrote up the results here. The author used a cable modem, FWIW.
posted by joshuaconner at 8:42 PM on August 8, 2005

I would highly recommend trying Voicepulse.com's VOIP. You can get local/regional unlimited calling for about $16/month, with 200 minutes of long distance (with cell phone, I don't need any more). Sound quality is excellent; no contract; they have more expensive unlimited plans. My only complaint is that I needed to get a phone with a earpiece volume control because the sound would otherwise be too loud. I downgraded to Verion's basic service, and am VERY HAPPY.
posted by ParisParamus at 10:00 PM on August 8, 2005

TimeWarner gives you about 768kbs upstream and 3Mbit downstream. Very fast. It is shared bandwidth, though, so your downstream can get pretty degraded if you live near a mess of bittorrent people.

We have TimeWarner digital in Brooklyn and Vonage and have been using both for two years.

The good: Vonage is cheap and compared to comperable DSL setups (which include a land line) Time Warner is cheap. The cost of having a basic landline phone package in NYC is totally out of control. You will spend about $45/mo at a minimum. So $50 for cable + $27 for Vonage is a better deal than $45 for phone + $40-80 for DSL (that is a lot slower than cable for downloads.) Basically my phone bill used to be around $80 (for unlimited calling and voicemail) so Vonage pays for itself. Did I mention that TW cable's download speeds are really fast? up tp 600kBYTE per second. You'd have to spend $125+/mo to get those speeds with DSL.

The bad: Vonage can be unreliable. If your net connection cuts in and out a bunch of times in a short period (and TW does late night work sometimes that does just that) your VOIP appliance can get confused. It isn't a big deal to fix it, just reboot the thing -- the problem is that you might not know it is out until someone tells you that they tried calling and went straigt to voicemail or the like. Every couple of months this happens a couple of times. All in all the service has been getting better and better, though.

Overall we are very satisfied and I figure we've saved about as much money as our mobile phones have cost in the interval.
posted by n9 at 4:28 AM on August 9, 2005

To your second question - I would look into Verizon's new fiber optic line broadband service, FIOS. Not sure about the current availability in Manhattan though.

It is very fast - 15/2 Mbps D/U, blows the barn doors off Comcast. The current rate is $50/mo. They do installation of the fiber line for free, and there is no requirement to have a Verizon phone number or phone service to receive broadband (though they offer a $5/mo discount).
posted by zogbie at 5:58 AM on August 9, 2005

I tried to send you an email, but you have no address listed, and one is not immediately visible on your site.

Thus, I cannot help you in the manner in which I would like.
posted by Kwantsar at 6:18 AM on August 9, 2005

I have Vonage and TWC in Brooklyn. I've missed a couple calls in the 9-or-so months that I've had it, but the quality for me is no better or worse than Verizon's crappy landlines here. Voicemails in email are sweet.

It is shared bandwidth, though, so your downstream can get pretty degraded if you live near a mess of bittorrent people.

Come on, seriously? I've never noticed that anywhere. I just took that as DSL FUD to compensate for their slower lines.
posted by mkultra at 6:42 AM on August 9, 2005

Yes it can and it can even knock out your cable modem if you are a heavy user of one of things.
posted by flyby22 at 8:44 AM on August 9, 2005

As I understand it, you cannot dial 911 using VOIP. Seems to be a major drawback in my mind (unless this has changed in the last couple of months).
posted by johngumbo at 9:12 AM on August 9, 2005

Umm... you totally can dial 911, you just have to log into their website (one time setup) and tell them where you are so that they can route the 911 call. I think they might do it automatically now when you sign up.

By the way, even though Vonage is great, it might be cheaper for you to go with the cable company's VOIP offering. I live in Northern NJ and our cable company (Cablevision) has this "triple play" thing: Cable TV, unlimited VOIP, and on-demand cable for $100. Since you might already pay $80-$100 just for cable + internet, this is a killer deal.

Also about FIOS, don't get your hopes up, it'll be probably be at least another year before Verizon offers it in NYC.
posted by exhilaration at 9:57 AM on August 9, 2005