[Cialug] VoIP

[Nathan C. Smith]

I had vonage for two years, it will only save you money if you actually use
it.  My wife complained about the call quality (both on ADSL 144k and T1) so
I finally cancelled it.  Since I started playing with Asterisk I've used
nufone Voipjet and a few others.  There is a lot more savings to be had with
a prepaid plan like these if you are only dialing out.  Vonage didn't have
DIDs in Iowa last I checked (4 months ago) so you can't have a local number.
We will be/are one of the last states to get local numbers.

If you do a lot of LD calling you might be able to get your money's worth
from Vonage, but I think there is going to be a big VOIP shake-up in the
future when some of the other companies start playing VOIP and we will start
to see some really cheap calling.  As long as the FCC stays out of it.  

My advice is to skip Vonage and either use Asterisk or wait for something
better.  BTW, a service called Bellster now offers free p2p asterisk to PSTN
calling over the Internet.  I used it last night and thought it was OK.  It
is new as of Friday and there may still be issues with it.

-Nate

-----Original Message-----
From: Neal Daringer [mailto:admin@c0wzftp.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 10:33 AM
To: cialug@cialug.org
Subject: [Cialug] VoIP



any of you have experience with VoIP telephone companies (i.e. packet8,
vonage, etc.)? just wondering if it would actually be worth checking out to
save $ on the phone bill.

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