Can you just remind me in what way Vonage's service was endangered by a group of lawyers meeting? Vonage's existence as a public company may at one time have been considered at risk (but not like a bad mortgage), but the service has never been affected by the Verizon legal attack.

I am a Vonage user of two years with excellent service for the period. But I bought it for the feature set which I have never seen bettered.

Omg Skype had ONE outage. EVERY phone company has had an outage. People are ridiculous about this stuff.,

Skype, and VoIP generically, is at the early "Model T" stage of the technology. Yes, there are potential problems and bugs, and I (as a telecom consultant and a VoIP engineer professionally) would make sure my clients understood the limitations. However, you've totally gone over the top here. No technology is perfect: it only takes one screwup with a backhoe and your landline phone service could go away.

With VoIP, especially if you have the resources of a Fortune 1000 company, you can have a disaster plan for "what happens". For smaller companies, your PBX can be housed in a secure datacenter in a major city, instead of in your office server room. In the event of a cable cut, yes your phone on your desk may be down.. but your phone SYSTEM will still be answering calls and letting customers know what's happening. You can even have it route calls to important employees' cell phones.

Mr. Schwartz is the one who needs a reality check. VoIP can, and does, represent a way for even the smallest organization to have 100% reliable telecom. Should a business user depend on Skype? Certainly not: it's a consumer-grade service that provides free "good enough" communications. It's not worth giving VoIP's technology a black eye because the bargain-basement company that's giving service away has an outage.

Chris;

You're too close to the industry to see the problem. It's being marketed as a REPLACEMENT for analog phone service. Yes, a backhoe can cut service. But to have a third party update blow away 200k subscribers just shows how fragile it is. And how many small businesses using VoIP have the resources to do the kind of backup plans you speak of. And the E911 problems are still there.

To keep VoIP up you need a stable internet connection, a stable ISP, AND a stable provider.
To keep analog phone service up is trivial compared to that.

I, personally, will never give up my POTS [plain old telephone service] until they pry it away from me. Cell, VoIP, whatever, are just not reliable compared to analog service.

Chris - 100% reliable telecom? Whaaaaaa?? Do you tell your customers this? I have seen NOTHING that is 100% reliable - ever - and any technology that depends upon as many factors as VOIP will, in my opinion, NEVER be 100% reliable. Physics just says "no".

Well, In Colorado (1999) we had a rash of outages.
I recall it was more than 3 hours though. More like 24 to get it all restored.
Any technology has weaknesses. POTS is starting to show it's age and is vulnerable to cutting of lines, Data Networks relies on a mishmash of connections (wire, satellite, etc..) that sometimes self-heal, sometimes don't.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4191/is_19991216/ai_n9962578

Major outages of 1999

On Sept. 14, about 4,000 U S West customers lost service in northwestern Colorado Springs when mice chewed through the protective covering of a fiber-optic cable in the 700 block of Vindicator Drive.

On April 24, emergency phone service was interrupted in Calhan, Peyton and Teller County after an animal damaged power lines at a microwave radio tower.

On Jan. 7, about 3,000 U S West customers in southwestern Colorado Springs lost phone service when a cable was cut near Interstate 25 and South Circle Drive.

Re: 100% reliable. My VoIP phone system consists of two Asterisk installations, one at an inexpensive virtual hosting company and the other on my cable modem service at home. When my cable modem goes down (which it inevitably does), I still have phone service, because the main PBX that handles traffic is the one at the hosting company. If the hosting company goes down (which has only happened once in the three years I've had this configuration), my home PBX "takes over" the SIP connection and answers the calls exactly the same way the hosting company's server would. In a hypothetical situation where BOTH are down, my VoIP provider has a feature that allows calls to be routed to a designated (in advance) telephone number: that is a cell phone.

In three years, my phone number has NEVER not been answered when somebody calls. I could NEVER reach that level of reliability with POTS: in my area alone (Portland, OR) there have been two significant local exchange carrier failures that has taken my landline down. What could I do? Nothing.

To compare Skype to "real" VoIP service is like comparing kiddie walkie-talkies to a real cell phone. To say "a third party update blows away 200k subscribers" would happen with ANY real VoIP provider is a laugh. It wouldn't happen.

Where I live, I have three differnet Internet paths I can take. I have a cable modem. I also live in Portland Oregon, which has a municipal WiFi service, which is adequate for basic VoIP. Lastly, I can also use my 1xEVDO modem from my wireless provider as a backup (which I have, quite successfully, used VoIP over). The fact is, data is data, and any way I can haul in a 160k/s data stream I have my VoIP service, be it over bonded ISDN, DSL, cable modem, EVDO, WiFi, WiMax, or even satellite (subject to limitations). POTS is just that: if the wire breaks, my phone dies.