For the past few days I've been able to play with the Vonage Internet telephone service. Not long ago Internet telephony was riddled with quality problems, but times have changed.
The consumer needs broadband Internet access and just connects a Vonage supplied Cisco ATA 186 endpoint. You plug a conventional analog phone into the box (or, for the more adventurous, splice it into your home telephone wiring) and connect the Cisco's ethernet plug to your home router (the Cisco seems to handle NAT very well).
Vonage bundles in a number of premium services that most of the local companies charge for - voice mail, call waiting and forwarding, custom ring tones, caller ID and three way calling (there may be more, but that's all I remember). A bit hole is that it does not support 411 or 911 calls. There is online phone management through a webpage (I didn't use this)
An interesting feature is that you can choose your own area code allowing people in that area to call you "locally" They offer a few pricing plans - $26 a month for unlimited local calling and minutes of long distance in the US and Canada, $40 a month for unlimited calls in the US and Canada. Since this is not considered telephony, the tax is apparently only a three percent federal tax (although I didn't see his bill to verify this).
There are also some small business plans that are significantly cheaper than what Verizon (the local phone company here) offers. International calls seem aggressively priced and there is folklore that Vonage will soon allow you to purchase an overseas number allowing you to have unlimited "local" calls.
I found the voice quality to be good but not excellent. Latency (delay) was acceptable for me - I noticed it, but rarely thought about it. Echo was excellent. If you downloaded a large file from an ftp site (eating up much of the bandwidth of your broadband connection), reception became choppy. There was a bit of noise on the line - not terribly objectionable, but none of the calls were as clear as conventional POTS (plain old telephone service). That said, it sounded much better than any cellphone connection I've used. It is notworthy that none of the people I phoned (about a dozen calls) asked if I was using a cellphone.
The web interface for voice mail does not work with a Macintosh (which is what my friend uses), so I was only able to check voice mail over the phone.
There are pluses and minuses with this type of service, but if you have broadband and a large phone bill, this may be just the ticket. If Vonage offers a local overseas number I would expect this will become extremely popular.
8:08:51 AM 
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