DComTalk.com

I live in Charlotte NC and am paying my phone company about $70 a month
for service-one line, unlimited long distance anytime and call waiting.
That is insane.

I have roadrunner with Time Warner but it appears TW VOIP prices are a
bit high.

1. Anyone have great experiences with Vonage? Any in Charlotte?
Bad experiences other than support?

2. Is there anyway in God's creation to use my internal or USB PC modem
to send out faxes like I am now able to? Or do I need to get a fax
machine cheap? I hardly send faxes but be nice to have ability...or do
I have to pay Vonage for a fax service option?


3. With my TIVO I guess I could try to make it work via WiFi with a USB
Linksys adapter but have not tried (or PowerLine Ethernet adapter).
Some people have suggested (in my readings) to try different prefixes,
to dial * or #99, etc..... w/o using WiFi. But it seemed hit or miss.

4. Answering Machine? Can I use my own answering machine that I have
now-would it work and would it understand DTMF? (I like to screen calls
at times)

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1
I know these items have been discussed here and there and I spent about
3 hours trying to find answers last evening.

Appreciate your guidance.
Patty

"Patty" <pattyjamas@hotmail.com> writes:

I live in Charlotte NC and am paying my phone company about $70 a month
for service-one line, unlimited long distance anytime and call waiting.
That is insane.

Just curious, how many minutes a month are we talking about?

I just have a few pay by the minute accounts open with a few voip
operators that charge 2 cents per minute with no monthly. For me that
comes out to a lot less on average than the $20/mo. to $40/mo
operators want. If you use 1000-2000 minutes / month, it may not be
cheaper for you.

One other thing you may want to consider. If you are mostly calling
one or two numbers it will be a lot cheaper in the long run if you
just buy the people you call a hardware voip phone and then call that
phone directly for free. For a one-time ~$60 expenditure you get to
call them for free from then on.

Calls between two VOIP don't need a service provider. One phone can
just call the other. It is only when you want to call normal
telephone system that you need a service provider to gateway your
calls into the phone system. Some of the for-pay place also will lock
up your phone with passwords they don't tell you so you can't connect
up to anything but their service. You of course won't be able to use
phones attached to their system to make free calls to random VOIP
phones on the net.

-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Direct SIP URL Dialing: http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/phonedirectory.html

"Patty" <pattyjamas@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1133466786.604709.54200@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

I live in Charlotte NC and am paying my phone company about $70 a month
for service-one line, unlimited long distance anytime and call waiting.
That is insane.

I have roadrunner with Time Warner but it appears TW VOIP prices are a
bit high.

1. Anyone have great experiences with Vonage? Any in Charlotte?
Bad experiences other than support?

2. Is there anyway in God's creation to use my internal or USB PC modem
to send out faxes like I am now able to? Or do I need to get a fax
machine cheap? I hardly send faxes but be nice to have ability...or do
I have to pay Vonage for a fax service option?


3. With my TIVO I guess I could try to make it work via WiFi with a USB
Linksys adapter but have not tried (or PowerLine Ethernet adapter).
Some people have suggested (in my readings) to try different prefixes,
to dial * or #99, etc..... w/o using WiFi. But it seemed hit or miss.

4. Answering Machine? Can I use my own answering machine that I have
now-would it work and would it understand DTMF? (I like to screen calls
at times)

I don't have Vonage, but I do have VOIP service. I use one that offers a
pay as you go plan as well as an unlimited plan. I'm not a big phone user,
so I end up paying a about $15-$20 a month as opposed to the $50-$60 a month
I was paying with my old phone service. You may be able to do better than
Vonage, especially if you don't use a lot of minutes.

I don't think you can use your fax modem to send faxes over VOIP. You may
not have good luck in general sending faxes over VOIP. As someone
mentioned, there are services that will take an email, convert it to a fax,
and then transmit for you. That is how the fax service works with my VOIP
provider, but I think they only do it for their business customers.

I guess I don't understand the issue with the TIVO.

I think your answering machine would work with your VOIP service. However,
many VOIP adapters allow you to assign distinctive ring tones to particular
number, block numbers, and do conditional call forwarding and schedule "Do
not disturb." Probably all VOIP providers offer voice mail that is
forwarded via email. Using a combination of these features, you can do
rather sophisticated call screening. That is a reason why you might not
want to use Vonage. You will be stuck with their choice of adapters and it
will be locked. You won't be able to access it's features and should you
decide to change providers, the box will be worthless.

"Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"
<wolfgang+gnus20051201T142552@dailyplanet.dontspam.wsrcc.com> wrote in
message news:87sltc1lrh.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com...

"Patty" <pattyjamas@hotmail.com> writes:
I live in Charlotte NC and am paying my phone company about $70 a month
for service-one line, unlimited long distance anytime and call waiting.
That is insane.

Just curious, how many minutes a month are we talking about?

I just have a few pay by the minute accounts open with a few voip
operators that charge 2 cents per minute with no monthly. For me that
comes out to a lot less on average than the $20/mo. to $40/mo
operators want. If you use 1000-2000 minutes / month, it may not be
cheaper for you.

One other thing you may want to consider. If you are mostly calling
one or two numbers it will be a lot cheaper in the long run if you
just buy the people you call a hardware voip phone and then call that
phone directly for free. For a one-time ~$60 expenditure you get to
call them for free from then on.

Calls between two VOIP don't need a service provider. One phone can
just call the other. It is only when you want to call normal
telephone system that you need a service provider to gateway your
calls into the phone system. Some of the for-pay place also will lock
up your phone with passwords they don't tell you so you can't connect
up to anything but their service. You of course won't be able to use
phones attached to their system to make free calls to random VOIP
phones on the net.

One thing to consider is that the party you want to call must have high
speed internet service. I am in a position where I only call three number
on a regular basis. Unfortunately, only one of these parties has cable
internet service. One has dial-up and the other has no internet connection.
The best I can do is to get a DID that they can call in on and use my VOIP
service to phone their PSTN phone. It still works out much cheaper than my
old conventional phone service.

"Vox Humana" <vhumana@hotmail.com> writes:

One thing to consider is that the party you want to call must have high
speed internet service. I am in a position where I only call three number
on a regular basis. Unfortunately, only one of these parties has cable
internet service. One has dial-up and the other has no internet connection.
The best I can do is to get a DID that they can call in on and use my VOIP
service to phone their PSTN phone. It still works out much cheaper than my
old conventional phone service.

I keep on forgetting that much of the US is still on dialup or
carrier-pigeon. Sigh.

I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to mention that I just read
that in Hong Kong one can get 100Mbit/sec ethernet to the home for
$34/mo (US dollars) and 1-Gigabit ethernet to the home for $215month
(US dollars).

http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.ph ... e&sid=3997

-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Direct SIP URL Dialing: http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/phonedirectory.html

"Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"
<wolfgang+gnus20051202T094733@dailyplanet.dontspam.wsrcc.com> wrote in
message news:8764q7l6w3.fsf@bonnet.wsrcc.com...

"Vox Humana" <vhumana@hotmail.com> writes:
One thing to consider is that the party you want to call must have high
speed internet service. I am in a position where I only call three
number
on a regular basis. Unfortunately, only one of these parties has cable
internet service. One has dial-up and the other has no internet
connection.
The best I can do is to get a DID that they can call in on and use my
VOIP
service to phone their PSTN phone. It still works out much cheaper than
my
old conventional phone service.

I keep on forgetting that much of the US is still on dialup or
carrier-pigeon. Sigh.

I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to mention that I just read
that in Hong Kong one can get 100Mbit/sec ethernet to the home for
$34/mo (US dollars) and 1-Gigabit ethernet to the home for $215month
(US dollars).

http://www.dailywireless.org/modules.ph ... e&sid=3997

I've been there myself. I keep thinking how I can get everyone to switch to
VOIP and then it occurs to me that they don't have a decent internet
connection. I keep telling people without high speed internet that they
could drop their expensive PSTN phone service and add high speed internet
and VOIP phone service for what they paid for the phone line. I find people
very skeptical and until the E911 thing is settled, the people I talk with
are reluctant to switch to VOIP. I think that VOIP providers are dragging
their feet on E911, only seeing the expense. I think that they would
attract many more subscribers if they had E911, making the expense well
worth the investment.

I also think that internet service is WAY too expensive here. There just
isn't any competition and the prices are too high. I think that
$25-$35/month is about right. That is significantly higher than the $45-$50
that is currently being charged by the likes of Time Warner and Comcast.

"Vox Humana" <vhumana@hotmail.com> writes:

I find people very skeptical and until the E911 thing is settled,
the people I talk with are reluctant to switch to VOIP. I think
that VOIP providers are dragging their feet on E911, only seeing the
expense. I think that they would attract many more subscribers if
they had E911, making the expense well worth the investment.

If I understood the gist of the e911 issue correctly, the requirements
are so slanted as to drive the SIP guys out of business. In the PSTN
world each central-office has dedicated leased lines into all of the
local 911 call centers that they would ever need to route call to.
There are 650 of these centers in the US, but the local telcos only
need to worry about connecting to the one or two that serve their
customers. Now the sip guys have to connect to all of the call
centers. On top of that, running 650 leased lines to each 911 call
center is prohibitively expensive. Now I may have totally
misunderstood the issues, so take the above with a pound of salt.
Here is one of the references I remember reading:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169705&cid=14143735

If the FCC really wanted to make sure the public was best served,
instead of making sure their good buddies in the telco got to drive
SIP/pstn gatewaying companies out of business, then they would mandate
that the e911 call centers accepted over-the-net SIP calls. Adding
the physical address of each caller to the sip headers of 911 calls
wouldn't be that hard. (Obviously one would want to have the address
info cryptographically signed by some responsible organization such as
the VOIP service provider.) Alternately the FCC could mandate that
each ISP needs to keep a accurate, remotely readable real-time records
of IP address to street-address. Adding that capability wouldn't be
that hard either.

(The latter might also have a huge effect on spam. Imagine being able
to get the snail-mail address of the 10,000 spammers that sent you
spam last month. At $500 per pop, that would pay much better than
just about any day job.)

-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Direct SIP URL Dialing: http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/phonedirectory.html

Did get a few dropped calls after talking awhile resulting in a busy
signal. Hmmmm..
Patty

Thanks all. Got Vonage today and it worked very well. Notice an almost
imperceptible amount of hum and static on some calls. Can live with it.

Even got a fax to go through with *99, as a prefix (via my PC and
modem).

Will play with it for 20 more days and then decide if I want to keep it
and kill my local provider thus saving about $480 a year. Got it for
$62 (with tax included) and a $50 rebate I have yet to mail in (when
done testing).
Might hook to phone outlet in one of my rooms to service entire home
after I disconnet local service ---or---- I may just buy a few 5.8 Ghz
phones with extra handsets.

Patty

I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to mention that I just read
that in Hong Kong one can get 100Mbit/sec ethernet to the home for
$34/mo (US dollars) and 1-Gigabit ethernet to the home for $215month
(US dollars).

yeah, shame it comes along with gov't censorship. Speed's nothing if it
can't be used freely. Same thing goes with carriers trying to block
services.

I suppose this wouldn't be a good time to mention that I just read
that in Hong Kong one can get 100Mbit/sec ethernet to the home for
$34/mo (US dollars) and 1-Gigabit ethernet to the home for $215month
(US dollars).

yeah, shame it comes along with gov't censorship. Speed's nothing if it
can't be used freely. Same thing goes with carriers trying to block
services.

Are you sure about that?

According to the wikipedia, Hong Kong still has a separate set of laws
from the rest of the mainland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_c ... c_of_China

The National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China
has passed an internet censorship law in mainland China. In
accordance with this law, several regulations were made by the PRC
government, and a censorship system is implemented variously by
provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, business companies, and
organizations. The project is known as Golden Shield. The special
administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau have their own legal
systems, and like most other laws this law is not applied.

-wolfgang
--
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/
Direct SIP URL Dialing: http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/phonedirectory.html