Possible moving my main landline to Vonage.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Nov 08, 2006 Posts: 1

Hello all,

I am about to move my existing landline ($43/month after taxes) to Vonage $14.95/month.

I do have Brinks Security and it looks like i will be saving a lot of work by getting a cheap basic line from SBC/ATT (I'm in the SBC terriotory near Dallas,Texas) so that i don't have to worry about what works with Vonage or not as we are in the process of getting DishNetwork with HD DVR service.

My current network is with TimeWarner HSI (formerly Comcast), 6Mb/down 800/up i know my future Vonage eqpt will be setup behind my router. I'm just curious as to what equipment is best suited for me that Vonage is currently offering. Should i go for the Vtech phone system that they offer or should i just keep my existing phones.

Thanks all! Smile

Posts: 63 · Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 1:48 pm Post subject:

I'll pass along my setup, which I think is similar to what you are looking to do:

I use some Panasonic cordless phones, which work perfectly fine with Vonage. These are two-line phones as I have two Vonage lines.
http://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-KX-TG5672B-GigaRange-Cordless-Answering/dp/B000F8L506/sr=1-8/qid=1163010932/ref=sr_1_8/002-2061769-6088855?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

I also have DirecTV, and to work around getting it plugged into the phone jack, I'm using a wireless phone jack from RCA that can handle modem traffic. It works fine, but the performance can be spotty at times as I've had calls dropped. There might be a better wireless phone jack on the market but you want to make sure it can handle fax/modem traffic okay. I also use this for my fax machine.
http://www.amazon.com/RCA-RC926-Wireless-Phone-System/dp/B000EIORUM/sr=1-2/qid=1163011085/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/002-2061769-6088855?ie=UTF8&s=electronics

Finally, while I do not have a home security system, I've been looking into one and the conclusion I've come to is that it is better to have a landline for that. There are workarounds with Vonage, but you'd have to hope you have a technician who knows how to set that up. For only a couple bucks a month, I think a landline is still worth the piece of mind for 911 service and saves the hassle on the security system.

I should also mention that I use an old WRT54G wireless router along with my Vonage setup: Cable modem-->WRT54G-->Vonage Router. This is all backed by a 6/384 Comcast line, a bit slower on the uplink then what you have which I think will give you better performance.

I've been very pleased with Vonage after some initial glitches. Sound quality is good I've had few reliability issues. If I had to list some concerns I'd say:
- Tech support is useless: If you have a problem, Lord help you in getting help from Vonage's tech support. They are among the worst I've dealt with.
- If you need to use the website to change call forwarding or any other settings, I'd be wary about some site reliability issues that Vonage has.
- Your phone is dependant on your internet. As such, if your internet goes down, so does your phone. I'll also mention that one time I started to upload a bunch of pictures to a website which took up all my upstream bandwidth and basically made my phone useless during that time and no one could hear me.

Net-net, you'll save some good dough using Vonage, it's fairly reliable with good sound quality...just be wary that it's not perfect.

Posts: 61 · Posted: Wed Nov 08, 2006 3:19 pm Post subject:

Lots of bang for the buck. That being said I probably wouldn't stay with Vonage if I didn't have a cell phone. Too many POSSIBLE issues; cable provider; power company; router hardware/software and then Vonage itself. I would probably use the digital cable companies (Time-Warner) service .... I WILL NEVER GO BACK TO BELL SOUTH LAND LINE SERVICE. I used TW's service for a while and it was great, it's just too expensive. That my 2 cents worth.