I have received my phone adapter and I have one phone plugged into my Vonage phone adapter. So far, things are good. The phone quality is excellent. I might even go as far as to say superior to my old service. I have made multiple long distance calls on the service and have no complaints so far. I also referred my brother-in-law and got 2 free months of service. I was able to log into the phone adapter and look around for a bit, but I did not touch any settings and I still have not enabled QoS on my Smoothwall box yet. The phone adapter appears to be doing some QoS of its own. I have captured some traffic from the device and most of the packets are given a “lowest-delay” in the TOS field of the IP header. So, I will have to experiment with my QoS when I get it set up to make sure that I am going to be able to manipulate these packets well.

My phone number should be ported over today. That means that I will be running every phone in my house off of Vonage tonight. In the meantime, I have had one phone plugged into my phone adapter. It has become known as the Bat phone. It is just a corded phone with caller id name and number that is sitting on top of my wife’s computer desk. Tonight, the Bat phone is no more. I will, of course, be writing a third post about my experience with Vonage. I knew this was probably going to be a 3 part series from the beginning. There really is a lot more I need to do before I write the third and final post. I want to determine if the user I am using to log into the phone adapter is limited to seeing only certain menus. I want to know if there is another user on the phone adapter that will open up new menu items for me to peruse.

I will try to come up with some statistics of how much downtime I have (which hopefully will remain 0). I will also get some performance stats for anyone who cares to look at them. Also, keep in mind that I am running with a 10MB/1MB cable connection so that may be the reason for some of my good luck with Vonage. But, I also use BitTorrent to download Linux ISOs. Therefore, I know that in the future there will be some contention for packet throughput. We will see what happens from this point. It’s anyone’s guess as to how this will turn out in the long run, especially since Vonage is tied up in legal battles with Verizon right now over patent infringement.

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Filed under: VoIP by Philip Williams