January 2, 2007
By Daniel Connor
Welcome to today's edition of the Vonage Voip Forum Digest. Hope you
all had a great holiday! Happy New Year to all of you and yours.
With business only starting to gear up this morning, there's an
exception in the fact that it is a very slow news day for Vonage.
Instead, we'll go straight to this
Vonage Forum thread about Voip basics, as well as a thread about
wireless router use with Vonage.. We'll also check in on Vonage's
stock price.
With the New Year comes lots of new and prospective Vonage Customers.
One of them is Peter99, who has started a new Vonage Forum thread
entitled Please
help, confused about Voip.
"I need some clarification: The way I understand it is I need a
DSL connection or cable and via the Internets (as Bush likes to call
it), I can get phone service," peter99 writes. "Sounds great,
appear to be cheaper than regular phone system (now I pay $40/mo) and I
am interested. However, I have DSL with Earthlink via my land phone line
and in order to switch to Vonage I still need my phone line for
Internet; so I still have to pay $40/mo so I can have DSL and in top of
that I have to pay $25/mo or whatever Vonage charges.
"Unless I am missing something do not see the savings?," he
additionally asks. "Second, can I get a second line for a fax
machine or with one line the system can recognize voice calls vs. faxes?"
Roscopco,
who is a fellow Vonage Forum Member, adds a comment.
"Yes you are correct, you need either cable internet or DSL in
order to use Vonage," he points out. "You should see if it is
possible to have naked DSL, which means no phone service, but just DSL."
Vonage Forum Member Steve48
then comes to this thread with an explanation.
"Right," Steve48 adds in explaining one of Roscopco's
point. "The cost savings comes primarily for people who are paying
for internet service independent of phone service. You won't save
anything unless eliminating voice service from the DSL saves enough to
cover the Vonage charge. However, if you make a lot of long distance
calls and are paying extra for that, the Vonage service could save you
money even if you keep your current phone line.
"As for the fax question, a separate fax number costs $9.99 per
month," Steve48 adds. "The voice line can be used for fax, but
the system does not differentiate between voice and fax calls. You have
to handle it manually, which can be inconvenient of you use fax a lot."
In a new Vonage Forum thread called WRT54GX2
Wireless Router & Voice Quality, new Vonage Forum Member N2Futur
includes some questions.
"We subscribed to Vonage yesterday. SPRINT Broadband connection
WRT54GX2 Router PAP2 Vonage device GE DECT 6.0 phone with answering
machine and 2nd handset Problem is that when the PAP2 is connected to
the WRT54GX2 router, the voice quality is horrible," writes
N2Futur.
At this point, N2Futur asks his question.
"If the PAP2 is connected directly to the SPRINT Broadband
modem, voice quality is crystal clear," N2Futur asks. "So now
we have the option of either using the phone or internet connection and
not both.
"Has anyone experience a similar problem or knows how to solve
this?," N2Futur also asks. "Haven't tried Vonage Tech Support
yet...."
"I'm not sure about the WRT54GX2, but I have a WRT54GX4 and had
a similar problem because of the SPI Firewall," fellow Vonage Forum
Member butterman writes. "The firmware version was seeing the
Vonage traffic as a denial of service attack and was dropping the
packets."
Then butterman
writes that he did two things to get around this in the end. He says
these steps included:
1. Disabling the SPI Firewall
2. Getting an updated firmware version from Linksys for the router.
"If you have the SPI firewall I would try to first disable it
and see if that fixes the problem," butterman writes. He then adds
that
he
Vonage Stock Report
Last Friday was the last trading day of 2006 on the stock exchanges. On
last Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, Vonage stock closed
at $6.94 a share, which was a drop of 3 cents from Thursday's closing price of
$6.977 a share, but then again it was a five cent climb from the session's
low price of $6.89 a share. Total Vonage shares traded on last Friday added up to reach
835,400
shares.
Once again, our Vonage Stock Forum can be reached from this
link.
We've Updated Our VoIP
Speed Test
The fact that both of the Vonage Forum threads we highlighted today
featured a Vonage Forum Member posting the results of his Voip Speed
Test gives me another reason to call your attention to our upgraded Voip Speed Test.
Instead of the simple upload/download test, this one has all the
reporting that is needed to diagnose ISP issues such as Jitter and
Packet Loss.
The advanced report screen has been configured with a "Copy to
Clip Board" button so you can easily paste the results in the
forums.
I would like to thank the following members for giving valuable input
during the beta testing: reebok,
Steve48,
NateHoy,
VonageTPA,
Trowski
and scerruti.
For those of you that are interested in the details behind the
results, the following are the tests parameters:
The test is located in Washington DC.
The data.bin file for the speed test upload/download is 10Mb with 8
seconds max time out.
75,000 bytes is used to calculate the number of supported Voip lines.
Other variables:
Voip lines simulated =1
Voip bytes per packet =8
Voip simulation seconds =10
Voip packets per second =75
If you have any questions about this test, feel free to post them in this
thread.
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