Still a Vonage fan

In Bad call, Adam Kelsey points to a discussion on Inlumenent about using Vonage as an alternative to the local telco, and mentions his concerns about the reliability of VOIP services.

I’ve been using Vonage since February.  As they don’t have 911 service yet, and I’ve got a teenager who could be home alone without a cellphone, I’m only using them as a replacement for my previous POTS second line.  Were it not for this issue, I’d replace my first line in a heartbeat.  It’s $10 a month cheaper than my Verizon line, even before considering that US and Canada calls are free.

As someone who worked a fair amount with VOIP a few years ago, I have to say that I’m totally amazed at how good the voice quality is—easily as good as the POTS line it replaced, frankly. 

The only downside I see is (as Adam mentioned) that I’m depending on my broadband provider (formerly AT&T, now Comcast) for service.  Then again, neither Verizon nor GTE before them have been a picnic either—Comcast would have to work to be much worse. 

A point in their favor is that if the connection to the box goes down (tested by my inadvertantly unplugging it in some rewiring a few weeks ago), their network availability backup smoothly routed inbound calls to my cellphone—a feature Verizon has yet to offer me when they have problems.