We have finally signed up for VOIP, also known as “Internet phone”. We’ve gone with Vonage, and have signed up for their $15 package, which gets us unlimited local calling and 500 minutes per month of long distance. That’s far more long distance than we usually need, but that means that we may be calling some of you more often.

We’re currently paying about $43 per month to SBC, plus who-knows-how-much for long distance. I guess we will probably save $25 to $35 per month. Of course, Vonage depends on our Earthlink broadband service, which ain’t free ($42 a month), but at least the VOIP savings offset the cost of Earthlink. Add it all up, and we get broadband plus VOIP for about what we used to pay for a traditional land line and dialup Internet.

Emergency services are something of an issue with VOIP. I’ve configured our 911 service, and verified that Vonage ties into the E911 service in our area. There’s also the issue of losing service when the power goes out. I have two ways to deal with that: I have the cable modem, router, and phone adapter plugged into the UPS, and I will keep an ancient telephone plugged into the adapter, one that doesn’t require house power. That should keep the old phone functional during short outages; for longer power losses, we can always fall back on our cell phones. In our four years here at Pine Gulch, we’ve had only one power loss longer than five minutes.

The telephone adapter came in the mail today, and it took me about an hour to get it hooked up, configured, and working. I got a bit flummoxed when I tried to configure the adapter’s IP address on the WAN port, the one that connects to the Internet. The first thing I do when I plug a new device into the network is to ping it, but the adapter wouldn’t respond to pings, and I assumed that meant the adapter wasn’t properly configured. Eventually I figured out that the adapter was fine, and that it wasn’t supposed to respond to pings. The funny thing is that the adapter will respond to pings on its PC port, the one that you connect a computer to for configuring the device. Hey, nice trick, Motorola.

We will be keeping our old phone number, but it will take twenty days (or longer this time of year) for the transfer to become effective. Until then, I can make all the outgoing calls I want. I have an old phone - the one that doesn’t need house power - hooked up to the adapter. When the transfer becomes effective, I’ll plug in our Uniden cordless sets, and eventually I’ll get all the house phones hooked into the VOIP adapter.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2005 at 9:09 pm and is filed under PGDC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.