The Vonage Box
After having a less than ideal experience with my Verizon line, I decided that I would try out a VOIP solution from Vonage. After 2 days of fairly heavy use, I’ve had a great experience with the Vonage system. If that changes, I’ll be sure to post a followup.
I decided to go with their World Plan promo, which is $24.99 per month (not including fees and taxes, those are around $7.00-$9.00 extra). The plan includes unlimited long distance in the US, as well as free calling to 60 countries (hence the World in the plan name). Along with the phone service, Vonage includes voicemail (with forwarding to email), caller ID, call waiting, and call forwarding. Perhaps the most important call forwarding feature is network availability forwarding, which will forward calls to another number, such as a cell phone.
The plan includes a phone adapter for free if you order through their site. This adapter can plug directly into your cable or DSL modem, and then pass the connection off to your PC or router. I am using an advanced configuration since I have some other port forwarding settings that I wanted to keep. This configuration involved plugging the adapter into the router instead of the modem. If you choose to use this configuration, you’ll need to enable port forwarding for UDP ports 10000-20000. I wouldn’t advise this unless you are comfortable with changing settings on your home router.
Since this phone service is entirely dependent on your Internet connection, keep these tips in mind:
- If you have frequent outages or other network problems, this probably isn’t the solution for you. VOIP systems like Vonage need a reliable Internet connection to function.
- If you are using an advanced configuration like the one listed above, you may want to configure QOS settings to prioritize traffic on UDP ports 10000-20000. I have been able to use the service while streaming media with no issues with QOS settings.
- Vonage does allow you to adjust the audio bandwidth needed for the service on your online dashboard. If you use the service and have quality issues, you may want to try lowering the quality of the encoding.
If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to comment on this article.
