Review: Vonage VoIP Net 'Phone' Service

Feb. 20 -- Basic telephone service is plain boring to many people, including technology enthusiasts.

The phone line may have brought us our first Internet connection, but the phone itself has been around for decades with only a few changes. Not very exciting in a world of gigahertz processors, DVD recording, and file sharing.

Now there's Vonage (www.vonage.com), a service with a great marketing hook: flat-rate telephone service with all the long-distance and local calls you want for $34.99 a month.

The bonus for geeks? A cool device to attach to your broadband router.

Wait, that sounds like… it is! Voice-Over IP, or VoIP.

The Problem With VoIP

VoIP is high tech's replacement to a "plain old telephone service," or PoTS, line. It's been chronically overhyped as "the next great thing" for about a decade. But VoIP has trouble re-creating the instant back-and-forth of natural human conversation.

It turns out that converting full duplex audio (the ability to talk and listen at the same time) into data packets and sending them over a public network creates just enough lag to kill a conversation. Real-time conversation is an all-or-nothing proposition. For VoIP to be a success, it has to work as well as a regular phone. So why even bother with a new kid on the VoIP block?

What Makes Vonage Different

If the low monthly flat fee isn't enough, the aggressive ad campaign is sure to catch your eye or ear. Add to the mix a high-profile CEO and you've got enough funding to make consumers curious and investment bankers giddy.

Vonage requires 90 Kbps of bandwidth both upstream and downstream. You'll need a cable or DSL broadband connection, and you'll need to use a broadband gateway or router. It won't work with satellite or dialup.

What sets Vonage apart is how it provides service.

Vonage gives you a VoIP-to-analog network device (Motorola VT1005V, Cisco ATA 186, or little black box) that attaches to your router via Ethernet and lets you connect an ordinary telephone of your choice to the network. It's this little box that produces the magic of Vonage's service.