Service: Vonage
Referral ID: UGNSecurity
Service Type: VoIP Telephony
Rating: 4/5

Review:
Well, knowing how much line degrigation there was in the beginning days of VoIP I was pretty skeptical that anyone could provide a replacement for a telephone line purely VoIP; well, until today anyway...

After about a week of waiting I finally got my UPS package, the postman had shoved it behind an old portch swing we have so that no one walking up to the house would notice a $75 router sitting on my porch in a box .

Well, I open up the box and there sits my new Linksys RT31P2 (free with a valid service plan through vonage, comes with their welcome kit).

Taking the kit apart and throwing the new router onto my network (it's a 3 port router with 2 telephone ports) I set my desktop to be on the same ip range as the router so that I could set it up for my own network behind my router ( Linksys WRT54GS w/ Sveasoft firmware ).

Well, after a little tinkering and some port forwarding (5060-5061, 10000-20000, 53-69, 123) I was ready to connect my phones and make my first test call... I connect my new 5.8GHZ phones ( Uniden EXAI 5180 ) to my VoIP router and dial my first number out... Here I am met with an obsticle, I dial the phone too f'in fast for the router to send the signal! So, I slow my dialing a slight pace and the call goes through...

:ring: :ring: goes my house phone, sure enough, the VoIP was capable of connecting to the landline. I pick up the phone and say hello to myself, obstycle number two, there is a slight echo; nothing that bad, no one would notice should they not be in the same room as me... The line quality is excelent, if I hadn't known I was on VoIP I'd have never guessed!

I haven't had the chance to try out call forwarding yet, or the caller id and conferancing features, but everything so far is pretty good

Also, Links to my network setup can be found here