From Wired News: Minnesota regulators seeking to treat Vonage like a traditional phone company suffer a stinging setback at the hands of a federal judge. The ruling could boost Internet telephony nationwide.
This might be a good time to give you a quick update on my own Internet phone experiment. In a word, wow! I mentioned back on Sept. 22 that I was ordering Voice over IP that day with a small company out of Silicon Valley called 8×8 that offers a service called Packet8.
The first impressive result was that, after the quick and easy online ordering process, the package arrived on my doorstep 40 hours later. Inside was a gizmo resembling a modem that I attached to my NetGear hub and my land-line phone, and simple instructions for getting it going. I was up and running in 5 minutes.
The main thing you should know is: This really works. I can call anywhere in the United States and Canada without a long-distance toll. You do pay a monthly fee of $19.95, with a one-time setup fee of $30. A few days back I also mentioned a new service called Skype, from the creators of Kazaa, which lets you call almost anywhere for free, but the catch is that both parties need both a high-speed Internet connection and the Skype hardware installed. Not so with Packet8, Vonage or other services, where the other person needs just a phone, not an Internet connection.
The Packet8 FAQs didn’t allay a concern I had about switching back and forth between my Internet connection and regular phone line. But after a couple of minutes of use it became clear that it’s a cinch to do, and I’ve been regularly unplugging the VoIP line for the regular phone jack.
Why would I do so? Two reasons. I haven’t been giving out my Packet8 phone number for incoming calls, so I need to switch lines when I want to receive a call (I prefer to use this phone to my handheld phone when conducting interviews). The second reason is the connection of a traditional phone line is still superior, so if I want to make an 800 call or an important call with absolutely no dropoffs during a conversation, I’ll switch to my SBC line.
On the whole, the quality of the connections has been somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 95% of a traditional phone connection. When I make dozens of long-distance calls a month (as I’m doing now for my Newspaper Association of America project), that’s more than acceptable. Thus far, every call except one has gone through, and that one went through on the second attempt. On occasion there’s a small voice dropoff of a half second here or there, but most people who are called don’t even realize you’re calling over an Internet connection.
The one poor connection was my bad. I phoned customer support at GoDaddy over my Packet8 connection at the same time I was downloading an album at emusic.
The one other downside thus far is that when I gave out my assigned phone number to someone who called over over a regular line, the phone rang and they could hear me, but I couldn’t hear them. But I don’t see the need for giving out my number.
One major upside, to my mind, is that I no longer get steamed when companies like Microsoft or Epson make you dial a toll-charge long-distance phone number and put you on hold for 20 or 30 minutes before blowing you off. Now, they can’t add insult to injury.
Haven’t tried an overseas connection yet, but I hear that the quality of the connection is virtually the same.
I’d recommend this to anyone who spends more than $30 or so a month in long-distance charges, or who makes overseas calls on a regular basis.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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