Well I’ve been using home VOIP service for about 3 months now, and figure it’s been long enough to share an opinion on it.
I signed up for AT&T Callvantage service and was a little skeptical. I’d read about AT&T and Vonage and both had mixed reviews. I still decided to take the plunge with AT&T and couldn’t be happier.
I picked up the D-LINK Telephone adapter (wired version at Best Buy for $60, which comes with a $60 rebate (for those right-brainers out there that equals free). You can also order from AT&T and there are also wireless router versions available, but I picked it up at BB in case I wanted to return it the next day. I installed it between my cable modem and my router (more on that later), activated it via the instructions and a web site and was able to make calls immediately. I didn’t move my old number over at the beginning in case the service sucked, but after a week I had my Verizon number transferred to the CallVantage service, which took about 2 weeks.
To get all the phones in the house working I went to the outside telephone box on my house and disconnected the Verizon connection. I plugged a splitter into the wall outlet in my office, and plugged in the telephone adapter and a regular phone into the splitter. Now all the phones in the house were wired to the adapter and all work normally.
The quality sounds like a phone line. Nothing more, nothing less. I don’t get any dropped calls, I don’t get any static and I never have trouble hearing the other end (unless they’re on a cell, of course).
The web site is pretty cool. You log into the callvantage site with your telephone # and a password and you’re able to view all of your call logs and can listen to, download and delete voicemail right through the web page. I also have all voicemail forwarded to my email address (and then filter it into a voicemail outlook folder) so nothing important ever gets lost. I haven’t used it, but the call filter feature seems pretty cool. You can cause all calls or just calls from particular numbers to go to a do-not-disturb message or to voicemail, and even have the option to let the caller push a button to get through if the call is really important. You can turn this feature on until you turn it off, or you can turn it on for a particular amount of time. You can also designate that certain other phone numbers are yours, so when I call the voicemail line from my cell phone I just enter my pin, I don’t have to enter my whole phone number.
The cost is why I switched. It’s $19.99, plus $5.33 in taxes (911, local, state, federal taxes). They also have unlimited local and long distance plan for $29 total, but I don’t call LD much so I pay 4 cents / minute. When I was with Verizon, my bills ended up being $65 for local, including all the xtra costs (like $6.50 for voicemail). So now I have good phone service with the extra online features, for less than half the monthly cost.
Now for the D-LINK. First, it was really not meant for people who do anything more with their computer but visit web sites and use IM. It’s actually a router, and a poor one. Some instructions say you can put it behind your router, but most home routers can’t prioritize traffic well enough for it and the phone becomes unusable. So I put it in front of my home router and began setting up the forwarding. There are a lot of settings that look like port forwarding, but the one you actually want is “Virtual Server Configuration”. There you specify your other router’s IP and a start/end port, and whether to forward TCP, UDP or BOTH. While using the internet and the phone at the same time, the DLINK’s QOS control actually works pretty well. Call quality never diminishes, and internet speed is supposed to slow down but I’ve never noticed while playing Starcraft or CounterStrike, and works well when VPN’d into my office.
Bottom line is, if you want to pay less than half of what your paying Verizon for local and long distance, and pick up some extra features, get CallVantage. You’ll never notice you’re not talking on a regular phone.