I've been a Vonage customer since Aug 2005. In that time I've had one outage (for about 3 hours), no equipment failures, an occasional dialing failure (say one in a 100), no dropped calls and a few one sided conversations (say 4 or 5 total).

I've also had a local US and a local UK number, forwarding to my cell no matter where in the world I'm working, cheap international calls, voicemail via email, and numbers I can take to anywhere I choose to live.

I dropped the land line and use the Vonage numbers, not because it offered a higher quality connection but because it offers a lot more ways to reach me. The reliability may not be as good as the land line but it's better than my cell (and I'm not about to stop using it either).

I have VoIP from a different provider (ACN) and have had NO trouble AT ALL. EVER! This is my SECOND VoIP service (formerly with Packet8) and while there were different issues I experienced with that provider (i.e., strange garbling of voices once in a while), the service was comparable and, in many ways, exceeded my old AT&T service.

I wouldn't say that the "emperor is scantily clad"; I'd say he's just wearing different clothes.

I have had a similar experience with Vonage like Dave Beck has. My biggest problems have been with cable modem service interruptions (from Comcast originally... and frequently, then when we moved, less frequently with my new cable/internet provider).

When we moved into my in-laws house while building our own house we decided to go with Vonage rather than run another line into the house. At first we were very pleased with it but over time we have experienced more and more one-way conversations. I have tweaked my Vonage settings and turned all my computers off but it hasn't made a difference.

My wife keeps getting frustrated but figures we are better off paying the lower price (for now). We have two Vonage lines so I can have a local number for the company I work for in another state. Even with two Vonage lines we pay less than my in-laws do for their single line and we have more options.

My future son-in-law has Vonage; the quality is wretched. It might work over a cable IP connection; over DSL it's marginal because of the restricted upstream bandwidth.

I was a day or two from installing VoIP at home a couple of years ago when I was offered a good deal from the local phone company that gave me unlimited long distance for less than what Vonage would have cost me. I took it, and will eventually get around to installing Asterisk as a local PBX and advanced answering machine, which it will be very good at.

I've had Vonage about 2 years now. I've found it about as reliable as the land-line phone service it replaced. The only time it doesn't work is when my RoadRunner cable modem service is having a problem.

I've been using Packet8 for about 8 months. I seemed to have a few problems in the first two weeks, but none since then. The quality is almost as good as traditional land lines, and equal to my cell phone. Cost wise I'm saving 50% over a land line (and I specifically chose Packet8 as a vendor charging less taxes, seems to me Vonage is charging some standard land line taxes "just in case".)

I'm thrilled with my service, and being I'm going to be moving soon, I'm thrilled that my number is going to move with me and not be tied to it's physical location.

Thank god for your article, I have been a Vonage customer since December 2005. I have tried a lot of configuration: PAP2 through a router, router with included phone device.
I experience a lot 95% of one way call where the called party tell me my voice is garbled.
I have tried Comcast and Clearwire as ISP always with Vonage with no more success with one or the other.
The best way I have fond to use the service is for me to temporarily route my home calls to the number I want to call or route my home number to my cell phone if someone wants to call me. Not very practical...
That way, I get clear and non interrupted two way calls.
Interesting, I have friends from Canada who use VOIP from their ISP with no problems.

We installed a VOIP system at our company last October. It used a very expensive CISCO router. I don't remember the exact model. After receiving so many complaints of dropped calls, poor voice quality, cross talk and problems making connections, we had the system removed in December (06). There won't be any VOIP around here for quite a long time. It also has kept me from switching at home. The quality was no where close to our conventional PBX system. So I'd say the emperor is pretty much naked.

Ephraim:

I think you're conflating a great number of issues into a single one. Let me hit the high points.

Yes, consumer IP-based telephony solutions, what most people think of as "VoIP" service, have a great number of problems and spotty reliability. This is in large part because there's little or no management of the endpoints, and if your neighbor is suddenly downloading a BitTorrent of the latest illegal movie copy, your voice performance goes in the toilet. You'll never be able to diagnose the problem, or even measure it--result: Crappy phone calls.

Commercial-grade IP-based communications assume management, and they assume someone to manage them. This underlies Microsoft's UC offerings, along with everyone else's.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's UC offering has a long way to go before they can provide what their ads promise. Owners of (e.g.) Avaya or Nortel PBXes require a whole host of third-party interface gear to play nice with the Microsoft solution, as MS has no SIP-based interface strong enough to directly control/get along with those PBXes. They promise better integration Real Soon Now, but caveat emptor.

Of course, the underlying problem with VoIP is really education, particularly of IT people who have massively underestimated ideas of reliability and quality. Companies stupid enough to allow the it-works-mostly approach for computing to degrade their voice communications decisions get what they deserve.

In the consumer market, Vonage's continuing legal and financial problems are no help in this regard, and when they inevitably go bankrupt or get bought out the consumer VoIP business is going to get another well-deserved black eye.

I only mention the $1.5 Billion (with a B) which eBay overpaid for Skype as another indicator how overblown the consumer-IP hype is.

At the same time, Cisco is taking more billions-with-a-B out of the bottom line for former highfliers like Avaya, Nortel, NEC and Toshiba. Cisco, for their many faults, has convinced corporations to use Cisco Call Manager as the underpinning for their next-generation, all-IP voice/data/video/everything networks. It took an extra five years for Cisco to get it right, but IP telephony is here to stay, like or no. That doesn't mean unmanaged consumer VoIP is a good thing, or will remain in its current form, though.

--Alex Pournelle

I have been a Vonage customer until recently. I had used the service since October 2004, and was pretty happy with it. We had the Unlimited package, and the quality of voice calls was very seldom worse than what we had had on the old SBC landline. The main reason we went with Vonage was price; SBC charged $37 and change for basic voice service with no long distance, no caller ID, or any other special features. Vonage had all these in contrast, for a total charge of about $30 a month, after all the extra charges, taxes, and fees were added.

Why did we drop Vonage? We were happy with the service, but we weren't using it enough to justify the monthly cost. We went to Skype instead, where for $90 a year I can get a number for incoming calls, and unlimited calling out to POTS lines, as well as unlimited long distance in the US and Canada. That's basically the same service as we had with Vonage for a fourth the cost.

VOIP is a reliable landline alternative for me. For others, it may not be. But with reliable broadband coverage, it's been good enough to replace our landline for over three years. I can only see it getting better in the future.

Big negative in areas where storms can nock out the power: how good is the service when there is no power in the house? Same thing goes for fiber optic lines. I have had to call in cable & power outages several times due to storms & electrocuited animals. The copper line was there and working. Only once in 25 years has the copper line been out at this house. Lightning had melted the connection box on the side of the house. Everything else was out too. I just could not feel save relying on VoIP seeing how often people nearby go without service "using" VoIP which by the way is more expensive than Verizon monthly bill of $28.

I've had VoIP through Time-Warner Cable since it was first offered several years ago and have had absolutely no problems with it. It has been at least as good as my old AT&T service.

I've been using AT&T's CallVantage VoIP service since July of 2004, and I couldn't be happier. The voice quality is excellent - usually superior to the POTS service I've had in the past. I've had a few small issues, mainly due to occasional power dips at my house. This past summer, the ATA semi-failed - it still worked as an ATA, but for some reason the LAN passthrough went wonky. I called AT&T, was answered promptly (as usual) by an incredibly helpful lady who listened to the troubleshooting I'd already performed, agreed that it was obviously bad, and overnighted me a new Linksys WRT54G-based ATA - quite an upgrade from the old DLink! Another support call entailed a problem with port forwarding - the support tech was very helpful in providing me with the specific ports I needed to reserve for the TA.

Mr. Schwartz, I'd have to say I'm disappointed in this article. Claiming that VoIP in general is bad, based on your experience with only 2 of the dozens of residential VoIP providers in the market (not to mention all of the business-class VoIP providers), is disingenuous. That's like saying all hard disk drives are no good, just because Hitachi and Samsung drives suck.

I've had Vonage for 4 years now. The quality has gotten better and the features are superb. I love the forwarding of messages to my email address, as well as the virtual numbers that lets me have a local Montreal number that rings in Boston, as well as my local Boston number.

And for $25/mth I also get free long distance to Canada. Since Verizon Wireless dropped that feature, Ive made good use of it on Vonage.

The only problem I had was occasionally the phone would hang up exactly 25 seconds into a call. Consistantly and for 12 to 24 hours. Then it's fine for 3 more months.

The biggest problem I see is that support expects a certain level of technical folks on the inside of the call. They can ask you to reconfigure the router or to play with the firewall and I cannot see this being done by some 65 year old lady who had the whole deal installed by her nephew that lives on the other side of town. Also, regular requests to reboot your entire in home network by the techies is just plain DUMB in the investigational phase of a support call.

I'm anxious to see how the new T-Mobile service works however with a cell phone that can go into VoIP mode in the house. It would be nice to have a seamless transition.

I've had experiences similar to what you report using the Skype service (dropped calls, delays, echoes, poor sound quality). On the other hand, my employer provides, for work from home, a VOIP service that has been essentially flawless. Obviously, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the technology, but it must be implemented properly (and with sufficient hardware capacity, I suspect) for it to be truly usable.

I'm another thumbs-up vote. I've had Vonage for a year now (riding on top of cable internet from Comcast). Only issue have ever been when cable modem needs a reset after a storm. Prior to that I had Comcast's own digital voice service for a year with no issues whatsoever.

Vonage has indeed been problematic, but your comment about "Spotty coverage within a single household with dead spots" leads me to question the lenses through which you are viewing the emperor. Spotty coverage with dead spots is a WIRELESS issue. It has nothing whatsoever to do with VoIP (unless peripherally if your provider gave you a cordless phone). If you can't see the technological differences between Wireless and VoIP perhaps you should get new glasses before you publish fashion commentaries.

Carrier grade VoIP service is every bit as good as "regual" voice service in large part because they are the same thing. Once you get past your local loop between you and the telephone company EVERY call is some flavor of VoIP in today's public network.

I had an issue with Vonage at first; then, taking a cue from work, invested in a router that offers QOS (a D-link SOHO router, cost just under $100). Now - no problems at all, whether I am d/l'ing a large ISO or my wife is listening to a streaming service via a wireless coneection - the phone works fine.

I've had Vonage at home for three years and couldn't be more pleased. The garbled calls are very rare and the last dropped call was over a year ago. The voice quality is usually as good as my land line and always better than my cell phone. I've never experienced a one-way conversation.

The only reason I still have a land line is because I can't get a local Vonage number where I live.

For me, a main advantage is cost. I have relatives in Canada, Asia, and the Middle East. We all have Vonage and talk as much as we want for $30 a month. Without VoIP my phone bills would be right up there with the mortgage payment.

I have a niece attending Drexler University in Philadelphia. Her mother lives in Manila. The Vonage line in Manila has a Philadelphia number so phoning home is a local call for the girl. Try accomplishing that without VoIP.

For once I agree with you, Ephraim.

We've been hearing that VOIP is the best thing since sliced bread for 10 years now.

And, now as then, its all marketing BS.

Everyone:

Ephraim, thanks for posting this message. Commenters, thanks for posting your experience. I must say that I am paranoid about anything other than POTS.

The problem is that I have experienced "tinniness" and other distortions when people on VOIP systems call me. Especially, the calls that I have sometimes had with recruiters from overseas.

Unfortunately, now that I am over 50, tinniness and other distortion problems (which I believe to be artifacts of digital compression and low bandwidth) make it hard for me to listen to VOIP phone calls. Especially, if I call in from work into AT&T's voice mail on my phone.

I am guessing about this somewhat. However, when I have a regular voice connection from home (POTS) with someone on a regular landline, there is no distortion and I can hear the background noise on the line and know that I still have a connection.

Don't get me started on cell phones. They are much worse.

I use Vonage with my Verizon FIOS Internet service, and the quality is every bit as good as FIOS voice or a copper landline. I've had Vonage for some time; their outages are quite rare these days. In fact, I can say with assurance that most VOIP problems with Vonage are due to problems with whatever ISP you are using, or with your own Internet router hardware.

Can you say "emergency phone service"?

I've lived through two massive, extended power outages and never lost land-line service. I subscribed to Comcast's VoIP service a year or so ago. Before the end of a four-hour outage Comcast had lost its claimed backup power. No phone service. I'm back on land-line, and Comcast provides only TV and internet service.

Amendment to "emergency phone service": I did lose land-line service once (in 60+ years of using phones). A guy-wire on a pole snapped and took out the phone line. The telco repaired the wire in an hour or so after I reported it.

I've had VoIP for several years now, and I've found that the quality you get seems to be highly correlated with the bandwidth you have. Forget about VoIP on a low-bandwidth dialup connection. You need to have something high-bandwidth like Fios. Once the VoIP call enters the telephone network, there can't be any bandwidth issues, so the problem is strictly between you and your ISP... unless you're calling another VoIP line, in which case the bandwidth at the remote end matters, too.

Let's face it. You need high bandwidth in the modern world! Look for the best bandwidth for your buck.

Mr. Schwartz,

I have been a Vonage customer since June 2004. The only problems I've had with the service were not with Vonage but with either my cable service or my equipment (router, cable modem). I have both a "regular" phone number (unlimited) and a toll-free number (100 minutes) for just over $35/mo. All in all I have been very happy with the service.

I've had TimeWarner VOIP for about two years and never a dropped call. Early on the quality was a wee bit worse but now only real complaint is sometimes a very slight delay when picking up the phone.

I can not agree with your comments concerning VOIP. All VOIP providers are not created equally. Some companies have better tech support than others, better services, better features, and superior pricing. I have tried out 12 different VOIP providers and have found Packet 8 to be the best thus far, despite its shortcomings. Some of Packet 8’s short comings is that it does not provide tech support 24 hours a day and Packet 8 does not provide any tech support on Sundays either. Packet 8 does not support remote users which use high end VSat services that operate at T1 speeds, even though it passes VOIP delay and jitter tests. If one knows what they are doing...Packet 8 can be integrated with any PBX making it a hybrid VOIP PBX. With this said, I believe Packet 8 to be the best provider of VOIP services in the industry at this point in time. Also, using a VOIP box or service with out some type of VOIP quality of service mechanism is just asking for trouble. I have tried ATT, Bresnan, and Skype just to name a few. I do not own any stock in Packet 8; I am not a rep for them or have a financial stake in them either. I am a current customer of Packet 8 and in most instances I recommend Packet 8 to my customers. If one would like more info please feel free to contact me.

I can not agree with your comments. I've had VoIP for 2 years. Your comments about quality means you must have a very low upload speed on your service. I got didn't get VoIP until I knew I had enough upload bandwidth to handle the extra strain. None of my calls drop, there are no 'dead spots' in my house because my regular phones from the POTS days are the same phones I use today. The service went down once for about 2hours due to a power outage in my area. I could have resolved that if I had my ATA on a UPS for backup power. For ~$19/mo I get unlimited calling in US/Can, 18 calling features and crystal clear two-way reception.

VOIP relies on technology which is designed to collide and perhaps recover, drop packets and hopefully reassemble on the other end. POTS is designed for dedicated wires and office connections. True that today's CO's are digital and rely on packet technologies, but they are much more reliable than ethernet deployed in most non-telco use. Until the internet deploys technology which is not packet focused and collision designed, I stay with the old land line. The human mind is not programmed today to interpret all the loss experienced in VOIP. Perhaps in a few more generations this will be stamped in the mind of people who know no better.

Ephraim-

Corporate UC systems like Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya do not communicate to the PSTN in the same way as consumer based, broadband SIP connections. Corporations typically will have a voice gateway connected to the identical Digital PRI and copper POTS lines that old school PBX connect to. In most reasonably well designed corparate IP PBX systems, voice quality is typically consistent and of similar or better quality compared to TDM PBX. There is the potential of underprovisioning of bandwidth or misuse or no use of QOS policies that can affect quality - these are not similar to problems with Vonage, etc.

Why anyone is "proud" to accept poor communication services for a few dollar savings per month is beyond my comprehension. I'd bet these same people waste as much money on frivolous extras elsewhere. Penny wise and pound foolish, I'd say.

I have had AT&T CallVantage for about 5 years now and aside from some spotty quality in the first 6 months, I couldn't be happier and would hightly recommend it. It's cheap and I have never had a dropped call. The only time it goes down is when my router fails

Excellent article. This article truly displays the ignorance of the common consumer and even the 'educated' reporter (or pundit).

VoIP, as it pertains to any user, is dependant on QOS (Quality of Service) to assure the voice information is appropriately prioritized across the network backbone.

QOS is an end-to-end protocol; meaning that all devices between each end point must support the QOS algorithm utilized.

Old-fashioned telephony ALSO requires end-to-end QOS in the form of an entire circuit.

VoIP, as it pertains to the Vonage masses, is highly dependant on the internet. Depending on the connection from a particular location, and through the various backbone providers, QOS may not be available.

As a technology, VoIP technology is highly refined; well-designed and adequate to the task of providing high fidelity, highly scalable and highly reliable communication service when utilized with appropriate companion technologies and infrastructure.

As an infrastructure tool, VoIP is highly scalable and highly cost effective, providing the ability to carry between 70 and 160 voice calls on a single T1 without any loss of quality (compared to toll-grade ADPCM (ala old-fashioned ATT) voice service.

Overall, with a little care and utilizing best engineering npractices, VoIP is an excellent replacement for circuit switched voice service. Unfortunately, much of the public still believes that VoIP (as well as TCP/IP and the internet) are majic portals; providing unlimited access to unlimited locations with no technological challenges. Our 'plug and play' society responds with alacrity at the slightest mention of a technology that may require some expertise or study to implement.

My organization just joined the ranks of the VoIP world (about one month), things are different; while we have a whole range of ring tones, we also have a problem with fanthom calls. One can answer a call and it is nothing but blank space at the other end. This goes on all day quite often.

it's kind of funny people complaining about the voice quality for VOIP when the real issue is your ISP. Check this out: Comcast blocks some Internet traffic http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071019/ap_on_hi_te/comcast_data_discrimination

Switched to Charter from AT&T when it was available. Not as reliable as AT&T, I admit, but they are new in the phone business and it is an educational experience with them.

I can call anywhere in US and Canada with no additional charge. No hassle, no problems with "special long distance calling plans", etc.

If the service shut down permanently, then I would probably just use cell. I'm sick and tired of AT&Ts billing games!!!!!!!

Since the switch, I have never seen questionable third party charge on my bill, knock on wood.

Allowing themselves to be the collection agency for third party schemers was the biggest mistake in the phone company history.

You missed the real shortcomings of voip:

1 - reliant on IP connection, no IP or power means yer dead in the water.

2 - unreliable fax or data transmission

Advantage:

NO NEED FOR AT&T
NO NEED FOR AT&T
NO NEED FOR AT&T

I get garbled calls and tinny calls and "underwater" calls on my local POTS/DSL provider's lines (Centurytel).

I think it's just the cheap cordless phones combined with CTel's poorly serviced lines.

I would love to try VoIP, but to try out Vonage I would still have to pay $30+/month for CTel's local service, then another $30+/month for CTel's DSL - because the local cable provider went belly-up over four years ago. So instead of getting away from CTel, as I'd really like to do, I pay them $100/month for local calls, long distance, my choice of several included features, and DSL internet service.

I just wish they had told me up front that the special bundle price was only good for 12 months.

And I wish they would explain what the extra $6.00/month charge for local phone service is on my bill - because the salesperson said the bundle included local, long distance, and internet...

so I am unhappy with my home phone service, and my Cingular cellular service is "the new AT&T" and is already starting to suck

Why do businesses take such joy in crapping on those of us who live in rural areas?

I support a medium sized office utilizing VIOP and PC's that run Citrix applications. Can you say poor performance? At best, we get garbled sound, at worst dropped calls or the inability to dail out. The amount of bandwith needed is incredible to even come close to land line performance. VIOP the best thing? The last place I worked had a land line that went out once in an ice storm. It was back up in less than six hours. Other than that I can't remember a time in 7 years our phones didn't work. Until VIOP can produce bullet proof reliablity and call quality like that of a land line, I'd say back to the drawing board with it.

I think Vonage is the best thing since slice bread. I am currently stationed in Bahrain and my service works absolutely wonderful. It saves me lots of money and I am able to conduct business in the states without the high cost of telephone bills. Hopefully, Vonage is able to take care of their legal matters. I would love to buy stock soon.

attn webmaster:

please re-design the print command with CSS3/xhtml2 so that the comments can be (optionally) included in the re-formated output.

btw: thanx for not using javascript for the print command! ... but sadly, jscript is used for the login command :-(

Have been using Comcast's (cable company) VOIP for around a year now and the service has been perfect. No difference between Comcast and POTS - just much cheaper with many more features.