Community poll forum: Do you use VoIP service at home?

I only use landlines for incoming calls (that saves me 15 pounds a month in line rental from my cable server)my favoured web phone server being "Callserve" the downside being if you use a premium rate number they are about three times higher in price.(than normal mobile phone call costs) .so remember to ignor vox-pop television phone-ins and sex lines..

Basically VoIP is the next generation in Voice communications, it bypasses plain old telephone system because it passes thru intenet...so what's the deal?! Saves you lots of $$$, in my case i live in Philippines the cost per minute in calling U.S. is $.40 so my average minutes used is 600 minutes X $.40 =$240 but on my Vonage VoIP i just pay a flat rate of $24.95 that's it unlimited calls to US, Canada & Puerto Rico! Simply Saves me a lot of money! Vonage Quality is great! Value Added Services are cool!(not to mention, it's free ) if you want a good VoIP service, get Vonage!

You don't need any service or special apparatus. All you need is a set of headphones, a microphone and your computer hooked up to the Internet.

I am a new user of Vonage (6 months). I think that the service is great. I am connected to the internet via cable (Cablevision). I am saving $30 to $40 per month. The only problem I have had is with momentary power hits, which happen quite frequently. I lose my phone because my routers have to be reset and I am not aware of it. I just bought a UPS so that my computer and phones (multiple cordless handsets with one base station) will continue to receive power for at least ten minutes. I also have a cell phone as a backup. I don't think I would ever go back to a landline.

I've switched over to Vonage about six month ago and love it. Setup required some walking thru, such as making sure that 911 calls were correctly routed. I also setup my younger sister on a plan. One of the unanticipated setup hassles was dealing with my home alarm system that needs to be in contact thru a telephone line. However, Brinks security was able to patch to the VOIP box. Local and domestic long distance has been flawless. I've noticed a slight lag with overseas long-distance, but can't be sure that this is all attributable to VOIP.

I have a home business with 4 phone lines, DSL, router, fax, credit card processing machine, 3 computers and network printers. I tried VoIP and am going to go back to regular land lines because with VoIP I am not able to use the fax or the credit card machine on that line. My incoming 800 number can't be put on that line, either. Also, the line is down a lot and has to be re-booted. Connection is fuzzy much of the time and many calls are just dropped. To run a stream-lined business everything mush work very smooth and VoIP just causes too many problem. Maybe later when more wrinkles are smoothed out.

I use Skype. The quality is variable. Sometimes it's far better than my expensive landline. Sometimes it's not and I get terrible echoes. For calls inside the US and Canada I'll probably use my landline for the time being. For calls to Australia, China and Mexico I'll use VoIP even though the quality is a bit shakey at times. I especially like the ability to call from my phone to local non-computer line at the other end. It's a lot cheaper than my landline and the quality is often as good.

Yes I do. My son in law got me interested more than a year ago. He and my Daughter were living in London U.K. and have since moved to Holland. Being that we both are Vonage users all of our calls are free.
Additionally I live in Florida for 7 months a year and Vonage has portability. I set up my phone in Florida with my area code from back home in the North and all my other children back home can phone me for just the cost of a local call.
Another reason: My son-in-law and my daughter who are living in Holland have an area code there that is New York City ( 212 area code). Being that I also use a cell phone with unlimited long distant service during the weekend I can be at the pool or beach in Florida and speak to my daughter in Holland without incurring any additional charges because I'm calling New York City area code eventhough she is actually in Europe.
Another reason is the additional features included in the service.

VoIP can be great for business use, short calls or if all your family and friends are long distance from your current residence, but there are too many "hidden" issues and costs to consider. First, your computer and your broadband ISP quality. Both have a MAJOR impact on your VoIP service quality. If your computer slows down pretty quickly during long sessions (full cache), your VoIP conversation can start to break up and actually become worse than a cell call in a "dead zone". If your broadband is through cable modem, the more people in your neighborhood that are online, the more likely your call quality will degrade. Plus, if your ISP is down (like "cable maintenace" in the area), your VoIP service is down! Not to mention that not all areas or providers have 911 on VoIP yet. Then there is the cost of your broadband to consider. True, most of us are already paying that cost but most wouldn't consider that as a part of our phone service cost. With VoIP, you must have the broadband so it IS a part of your phone costs, whether it's through your phone line or cable or satellite. Until ISPs and computer systems can be totally reliable and guaranteed not to crash, slow down, etc., I'll stick with my landline and just shop for the best "package" deal. Since SBC lowered their DSL price to only $14.95 a month, my bills including phone, voice mail, and DSL are about $15 LESS than just my cable ISP was running me and unless a phone pole is knocked down, I'm always up...phone AND ISP.

If it is a voip service that works with a standard phone, why wouldn't it work with a captioned phone? Isn't the text sent by some coding that is constrained to fit in a standard phone frequency range?

Like or not, lots of long distance calls are already converted to data packets so I don't see that a good voip would work any worse than existing long distance circuits.

Our experience has not been so good. There is a lot of fading in an out. Either we cannot hear or the person with whom we are speaking can not hear us. Since my husband uses this phone service for his home-based business he has logged a lot of customer complaints.

We are considering trying Vonage's service or just using our cell phones, since we have to pay that bill anyway.

While I love the idea of VoIP particularly how Packet 8 allows us to use our regular phone to make IP calls, I am not certain that VoIP is ready for at home use.

Coincidently, I recently found a used IP business phone for under 100 USD. It was an earlier version of the Avaya phone we use at my place of employment. The phone has many features like directory lookup through our server, confrencing, transfer calls, multiple lines, etc. These phones work well except that the sound quality is not as good as land line. Perhaps if the price of IP phones went down then people could buy them for at home use and then just use them with an IP service. The downside would be that you may need to leave a computer on all the time depending on what phone features you want to use or the requirements of the VoIP service provider.

I used Vonage for more than a year before switching to Lingo. They finally got Vonage to be pretty reliable although Lingo's introductory price was just too tempting to ignore. Lingo still has issues with dropped calls and audio transport going half-duplex from time to time. The fundamental problem is IPv4, which has no support for Quality of Service. IPv6 will address it, but will be slow coming to the public internet. In the meantime, when Lingo's service works (which is much of the time), it is the most cost effective way for me to talk to friends and colleagues in North America and Western Europe. In my opinion, Lingo is about as reliable as Cingular's GSM service.

Have used Vonage for over 6 months now and have had absolutely NO PROBLEMS. It took 5 minutes to set up, I got the 911 online and then said buh-bye to $96 flat rate calling from my land line carrier and have been thrilled with my $24.99 + $2 tax service from Vonage.

I have even gotten free months for recommending them to others and the other parties have been just as happy. I'd highly recommend VoiP (especially Vonage) to anyone. I'll NEVER pay for a land line again.

I'm considering it but not now because we live in a rural area where dial-up is all that is presently available. We expect cable to be available within 6 months.

One concern I had was whether or not the number of extensions were limited and if so to how many?