[TriLUG] Digital phone recomendations

[Jon Carnes]

Tanner's points are all good. Be careful though about the number of
phones you have driven by the Vonage box - it is only designed to power
2 ordinary analog phones, so be sure that your other phones provide
their own power (if you truely have 8 phones plugged into your home
line.

I cut Bell's line to my house a few years back, and I love having
Digital phone service (VoIP).

I would recommend that you go with your local Hosted provider - which is
Time Warner. Your internet is with TimeWarner so your voice traffic
would stay local to Time Warner. Thus you will have less problems with
Voice quality than if you go with any other provider. Vonage is only one
extra hop away, but a single hop on a stressed network can cause Voice
quality problems. That being said, I haven't heard anything bad about
the quality of Vonage over TimeWarner's network.

One other item that might concern you is Local Number Portability: the
ability to move your current home phone number over to another service.

TimeWarner is a local CLEC so they have no problems taking over your
number - or giving it back.  Vonage contracts with a local gateway
company that is a CLEC. If you go with Vonage then that local company
(and NOT vonage) now controls your number. A lot of folks have had a
*very* difficult time recovering their number - as in still waiting
years later... So if you end up not liking Vonage, then getting your
number back can turn into a crap shoot.

Good luck, and welcome to the 21st century!

Jon Carnes
FeatureTel

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 22:52, Tanner Lovelace wrote:
> On 1/20/06, Barry Gaskins <barry.gaskins at gmail.com> wrote:
> >    The time warner digital phone service is $39  per month for unlimited
> > calls but that does not seem to be the best deal.  Vonage has a $25 per
> > month plan for unlimited calls that we are considering.  But the box they
> 
> Unless you use your phone a lot, I'd suggest going with Vonage's
> $15/month for 500 minutes.  Extra minutes are just $0.03/minute
> which means you'd need to use more than 833 minutes/month to
> justify the extra $10/month.
> 
> > show has 2 phone jacks on it.  I can't figure out if I can just run a phone
> > cord from one of those jacks into a phone plug in my wall to make all  of my
> > current phones work or would I be limited to plugging 2 phones into the 2
> > jacks on the box I would get from vonage.  Since I have a wife and 3 kids
> 
> Yes, you can plug it into your phone system.  That's exactly what I have done.
> Note, however, that my phone cords all come to a central distribution point
> and I feed it from there.  If your phone system is one wire run to all the
> individual phone jacks, I would guess you could just plug it into one and
> do that.  I'd DEFINITELY, however, make sure that the phone lines were
> disconnected from the outside phone company lines first.
> 
> > and  8 phones in the house that does not sound very appealing.
> >
> >    I would ultimately like to get a card to put into a computer and have a
> > linux box running asterisk that can do all the cool stuff that would enable
> 
> Note that while Vonage uses SIP under the covers, it is a completely
> closed system.  If you want to connect it to Asterisk, you'll have to
> do it with an analog connection (i.e. run the line out of the vonage
> box that would go to your telephone into the analog->digital card
> in an asterisk box and then do the opposite to get Asterisk talking
> to your telephone lines.  If future Asterisk interoperability is a
> big concern, you're probably better off looking at a different VoIP
> vendor.  However, be aware that none of them are quite as
> "idiot proof" as Vonage is.
> 
> > but my wife is tired of waiting for me to figure out all the stuff that
> > would require and I don't have any time for that right now.  I plan to do
> > that at some point but I am thinking about doing vonage or something just to
> > try it out for now.
> >
> >    So does anybody have any suggestions on what company to use or warnings
> > about what to avoid? Does anybody have their digital phone plugged into the
> > house phone wiring to make all the regular phones in your house work?
> 
> Digital phones and analog phones use completely different signalling
> and can *not* be plugged into the same network without killing one of
> the phones (most likely the digital one).  Just don't go there.
> 
> Good luck with everything.  I'm sure there are many other knowledgeable
> people on the list who can point out all the mistakes I've made :-) and just
> how I'm wrong and you can get Asterisk working with Vonage. :-)
> 
> Cheers,
> Tanner
> 
> --
> Tanner Lovelace
> clubjuggler at gmail dot com
> http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
> (fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
> increscent, all sable.