Vonage vs. Verizon [was: Anyone had experience with Comcast SMC modem/router? ]

[Dan Jenkins]

Paul Lussier wrote:

>  Dan Jenkins <dan at rastech.com> writes:
>
> > The Comcast service has been exemplary though, as long as we
> > haven't needed to call them. We finally replaced all our Verizon
> > lines with Vonage, as Vonage had far better sound quality and
> > reliability than Verizon's voice wires could provide (at less
> > cost).
>
>  How long have you had Vonage? I've had them for over a year now. In
>  general, I'm satisfied, but there seem to be some annoying quirks
>  with them. The most frequent problem is the echo. It's not there
>  all the time, but it's there quite often.

We've been using Vonage since summer 2004, so about 2.5 years.
We had a lot of choppiness at the very beginning, but changing the
sequence of devices solved that. The Vonage MTA did not work well
when inside our firewall/router (which is a Linux system, to bring
this back on topic). Moving it to the perimeter solved the problems.

We do very rarely encounter choppiness when outbound bandwidth
loads are extremely high. I don't believe I've ever heard the echo. I
have noticed that long calls (say over 90 minutes) seem to get dropped
recently, but that could be a completely different issue. (Our phone
system is over 20 years old and has been showing a few quirks.) I've
been considering putting in an Asterisk system (to bring this topic
back on Linux),  partly so as to learn more about Asterisk. However,
as someone else said, I do want something that just simply works and
does not need to be administered, which is one factor in why we have
stuck with Vonage over Broadvoice and others. In our case, if it ain't
broke, don't fix it.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support Excellence for over a Quarter Century