Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

May 19, 2008

By Daniel Connor

Welcome to the Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

In the Forums
Egads! ISPs charging by the byte? A two page thread is lighting up the forums about one poster who is worried that his Vonage line will cost him money since his ISP is gonig to start charging by the byte with certain bandwidth tiers. Many repliers to the post have the attitude of "Byte me!" and who could blame them? Unfortunately, in many areas you only have 1 choice of broadband provider or 2 at the most. The good news is as one poster puts it, "at 90kbps, each hour is roughly 40mb. let's say you talk for one hour every single day, in a month, that's only 1.2GB...." The tiered pricing scheme for this particular person kicks in at 30GB, 50GB, and 100GB, so the 1.2GB probably wouldn't put him into the next tier. Still, if your data bandwidth one month is 49GB, Vonage could put you over the edge into the next tier, which would add to your ISP bill.

This is a bit off topic, but a worthy topic nevertheless. A poster talks about OpenDNS, a popular free DNS service that lets you configure your home router (or work router) to use the super fast & free OpenDNS severs. The poster is trying to add 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (the Open DNS servers) to his router, but it appears he might be switching from DHCP to static, since he is asked to enter the "mask" (netmask), gateway, and IP address. It should be as simple as adding these 2 IP addresses into the Static DNS1, Static DNS2, and optionally Static DNS3 fields on the router web config page. At least, that's how most Linksys routers are setup to add DNS servers. The WAN setting should still be "Automatic Configuration-DHCP" and NOT static. You could use "static" if you know the IP address given out by your ISP, but that usually expires once every few days to a couple weeks, so eventually you'd have to go and manually change it again. Best to stick with DHCP.

Many ISPs use a shared DNS server used by all the subscribers which can slow down your web surfing experience. The advantages of the OpenDNS are that OpenDNS runs on a big and smart cache runing on a high-performance network which is geographically distributed and serviced by several redundant connections optimized such that any DNS query request will be responded via the nearest location. OpenDNS has the added benefit of domain name typo correction where OpenDNS will corrent any spelling or typo mistake on the URLs on the fly. OpenDNS also intercepts phishing sites. So what's the catch? Well, the only difference from using your ISP’s DNS server is that you will see a landing page with advertisements and search results when the URL entered is not valid and isn't a typo that OpenDNS can correct.

In the News
Aberdeen Group, a market research company just put together the Annual State of the Market Report using customer input to create a ranking of the top 100 most influential technology companies. Guess who made the list? Yep, Vonage clocked in at number 68. The 2008 report is available here, if you're so inclined to pay for a research report.

Vonage Stock Report
Today, Vonage is currently trading at $1.80 (-$0.03) and closed Friday at $1.83 or 3 cents lower from Friday's close.

Vonage VoIP Forum Digest - May 19, 2008