Review: Vonage VoIP Net 'Phone' Service

Feb. 20, 2004 -- 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.

Here are the benefits:

A regular phone attaches to the box so you can talk on a "normal" familiar handset. You can even take it with you to the backyard if it's wireless. It's separate from your PC, so you don't have to have your PC running. The box holds your Vonage "telephone number" (we'll talk about telephone numbers in a minute), so you can take it with you. Attach the box to a new router and receive your call in the new location. You won't need to notify the phone company. Get almost all the telephone features you'd expect, including call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, and voice mail. You'll also get a few features you may not expect, such as online call logs. Vonage has also recently added 911 emergency calling.

Telephone Numbers and Taxes

Choose your area code when you sign up with Vonage. It provides numbers in more than 100 area codes (more are added every week), including prestigious 415, 408, and 213.

Choosing your area code may seem like a little thing to a home user, but for businesses it can add a whole new wrinkle.

Let's assume you have a large number of customers in Los Angeles but live in San Francisco. You can choose a 213 area code. It would appear as if you had an L.A. phone number, and your L.A. customers would be charged for making a local call. All the while you're taking calls sitting in your Marin County hot tub.

Since the FCC classifies VoIP as a data service (at least for the time being), Vonage customers avoid some of the heavy phone taxes.

Sound Quality

It's pretty clear Vonage has its act together. It has worked out the added features and put together a solid marketing strategy, and it's working to provide great value. The company has also added other calling plans with varying rates if the $34.99 monthly fee isn't your cup of tea.

Yet voice-over IP quality issues loom. This reporter has never liked voice-over IP, but Vonage is a different story. We're stunned at how good it sounds. We've talked with dozens of people over the service and they had no idea we're not using the regular telephone network. We were also able to use our credit card company's touch-tone menus.

Everything has worked just as it should, with one exception.

On a recent major holiday, we placed a call to North Carolina from California and experienced a lag too great to overcome. We decided to use our regular phone line instead.

Vonage assured us the problem must stem from additional users on our ISP's network. It'll remain a mystery why that call didn't work. It's no mystery that VoIP is still at the mercy of IP network traffic.

Drawbacks

This isn't all perfect. Vonage has its drawbacks. It's not for the paranoid, the safety conscious, or believers in Murphy's Law.

Here's why:

If the power in your house goes out, so does this service. You can't make 1-900 calls. If your ISP has a service outage, your phone's gone too. The IP stream isn't encrypted. We can't recommend this for lawyers, doctors, or accountants.

Vonage represents a major leap forward for VoIP and should continue to attract subscribers by providing a great service. As for this reporter, he's still too paranoid to dump his local telephone service provided by SBC.