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Vonage
Digital Voice Phone Service
reviewed
by Raffi Krikorian
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March
10 , 2003
| Let's hearken back to about three years ago -- I used to
sit at my desktop computer, yell into a microphone, and a voice,
coming in over my headphones would confusingly ask, "What?" This
was my constant experience with the telephone over the Internet
experience. It was clunky, it was kludgey, and it just was not ready
for prime time; definitely not something I would of replaced my
land line for.
But with Vonage's new service, that might all change.
Dressed up in a cute box with the words "Digital voice, now you
do have a choice" printed on it came the newest toy to grace itself
on my apartment's network -- a Cisco ATA186 box. Think of it literally
as this: a box with one side having an Ethernet jack, on the other
side a phone jack. I plugged the Ethernet side into my network switch,
and the other side into a spare 900MHz cordless phone that I had
laying around. Jacked the box into the AC, picked up the phone,
dialed *80 (as that was really the only instructions that came with
the box), and the phone very peacefully said "one ninety two, one
sixty eight, zero, fifteen", and hung up. I pushed the talk button
again, got a dial tone, and ordered myself a pizza.
This box, when coupled with Vonage's service, really provides me
with an alternative to land-line phone. My voice, and the incoming
voice, are digitized using the session initiation protocol (SIP),
the bits are shipped over my cable modem (as evidenced by the TX/RX
lights on my cable modem blinking wildly while I spoke on the phone),
off to one of Vonage's data centers where the phone number is actually
dialed on the phone network and the bits become voice. When I dial
San Francisco from my phone in Boston, the bits from my phone go
through my cable modem, are then shipped to a data center in the
bay area where a machine there dials a real phone to bring the bits
to voice. And it all sounds great -- well, great when you have spent
all your phone hours in the past few years on a cell phone -- those
that actually use land lines might complain that the voice sounds
a little tinny. Take the Cisco box wherever you go, and if you have
a "broadband" connection, jack the box in with a phone and your
number follows you (I had an entertaining experience plugging it
into the Ethernet jack of my Apple Powerbook and sending the phone
calls over the 802.11b wireless network) -- you need about 90 kpbs
to maintain a call, so if you are maxing out your DSL with divx
movies coming in and out of your favorite P2Pnet, then you might
want to throttle that down a bit before you make a call.
The Edison, New Jersey based company gives you one Cisco ATA186
and a phone number in an area code of your choosing (I had a little
piece of northern New Jersey in my living room). You have a choice
of two different levels of service to go along with this box: for
$25.99/month you get unlimited local/regional calling (where local/regional
is defined by the area code you choose for your phone number) and
500 minutes of free US long distance, and for $39.99/month you get
unlimited long distance. And you also get international rates that
rivals most common calling cards. The only problem is that the service
only delivers one ATA186, and that specific model is required to
use the service -- no other SIP compatible devices are supported
yet. If you want to use more than one phone with the box, you will
either have to rig up a network of telephone splitters and wires;
or you can do what some have done and hack your house to plug the
Cisco box into your house's in wall telephone network.
Vonage is attempting to bring a new value to the phone network
-- with their service you can check your voice mail from the web
and also have very accurate phone accounting of your last few phone
calls and exactly how long they lasted. They also provide telephone
number mobility meaning that if you decide to ditch your land line
for a net line, you can keep the same number. The one really pressing
issue (but Vonage promises to have this fixed by Q1 of 2003) is
that you cannot dial 911 right now -- well, you can, you will probably
get 911 in the wrong place though (if you have a 415 number in Boston,
you will probably get SF's 911). That aside, its a hard sell to
replace most of our cell phones with this, but if you still feel
the need to have a land line (or if you despise using your cell
phone and miss the ability to "shoulder" your phone while you talk),
then this might be -the- replacement for your landline.
bio:
Raffi
Krikorian
is an independant writer and software consultant. Originally of
San Francisco, he is currently residing in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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