Voip teleophony - Anyone know Packet-8 or others?

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 04:09:47PM -0500, Jeff Kinz wrote:
> We're getting ready to switch to VOIP over Comcast cable.

VoIP is limited by the quality of your internet connection.  How good
is your cable modem connection?  We have all come to expect very high
availability for phone service, does Comcast meet that for IP in
general?

The question of VoIP provider is a second issue.  I have used Vonage
and they seem to be excellent.  I have also used iconnecthere.com for
some outgoing calls and they seem very good--though I am mostly using
them on a poorer internet connection so I might have suspected them in
problems for which they were faultless.

Third is your own infrastructure.  Will you have your cable modem,
routers, and VoIP hardware all battery backed up?  (With a long enough
battery life?)  When you mess with your own router will you possibly
play with the nifty quality of service features or firewall rules and
get something wrong?  

As a customer Plain Old Telephone Service is simple, and that makes
for reliability.  VoIP isn't as simple.


I recently turned my Verizon service down to the lowest and most
metered level possible and am saving a lot every month.  (Previously I
had unlimited service selected in dialup modem days.)  Every call is
metered, but we don't use our wired phone much for outgoing calls, so
I think the metered portion of the bill has been under a dime every
month.  At some point we might do the number portability thing to
switch our home number to Vonage, but I expect we will keep some wired
service.  If nothing else, our Covad DSL is very reliable and it
requires a voice line.

Vonage is cool in that it will ring multiple numbers simultaneously,
or when the Vonage box isn't online send all calls to some other
number.

iconnecthere.com is nice because they will let me use my own hardware
(or software).


-kb