Archive: Business & Technology

Dr. Digit 'Splains It AllDr. Digit 'Splains It All

Lately Time Warner Cable has been inundating us with ads about their Internet phone.  Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephones take analog signals and transmit them digitally over the Internet, bypassing the conventional phone company's infrastructure and high costs.  While you can connect with nothing more than speakers and a microphone attached to your computer with some free services like Skype, the companies that capture the average imagination are those that use regular phones.

The advantages to VOIP service are many.  You can take your VOIP phone adapter with you when you travel, and your phone will ring wherever you are.  Another advantage is price.  Top rated Vonage has a $25 per month unlimited local and long distance plan that is about half that of a similar Verizon plan.  If you still have the old Verizon Freedom plan Vonage was less than half.

In fact, even though Verizon reduced their rates on their "Freedom" plan, it still costs more than twice that of Vonage once you add fees and taxes, and it has far fewer features.  Starting with calling area the Verizon plan lets you make unlimited local and long distance calls in the US and Puerto Rico.  Vonage has that, but adds Canada to the mix and additionally has much lower rates when calling other countries.

Verizon includes voice mail, caller ID and call waiting.  Vonage has all that, but adds 3-way calling, call forwarding your selection of area code, call transfer, "click-2-call" (you click a contact in Outlook and Vonage dials both you and the party you clicked.  When you pick up the phone you are connected), repeat dialing and other features.  With Vonage you can get voice-mail in a Web browser or you can set it to e-mail your voice mail to you.

The down side to VOIP service is that when your broadband connection goes down, so do your phones.  Vonage and other VOIP services deal with this by letting you assign an alternate phone number that calls will be forwarded to if your VOIP phone adapter is not connected.  If you have a cell phone you can assign it, or any land line.  

The other down side is that you need a broadband connection, and cable is best (after all, if you have DSL you still have to pay the phone company!).  But that comes with an upside -- when you travel you can take your phone adapter with you and it will act the same as it does at home. Your phone number remains the same, so people calling from home dial your local number.

For a low monthly fee you can add a toll free number to your line, and you can also have "virtual numbers."  Those are additional phone numbers in any area code you choose.  One handy use is that if your kids are in college in Colorado and you live in New York, you can get two local numbers, one in each state.  That makes calling home a local call for your kids, which leaves them with no excuse not to call.

Vonage is the highest rated of the VOIP phone companies, with great prices and a full array of services.  I decided to try Vonage over a year ago and have been happy with the service.  I've only been disconnected a handful of times when we had a blackout or the cable went down.  Occasionally I hear a slight echo on the line, not much different from when it happens on Verizon's land line.

We have one Verizon line and one Vonage line.  We purchased a set of wireless two-line phones and hooked the Verizon line to Line 1 and Vonage to Line 2.  The beauty of this is that nobody in the family has to learn to use two phones.  Both services work precisely the same on regular phones we got at Best Buy.  

Once you sign up, the company ships the phone adapter. If you have cable television you don't have to use their brand of VOIP service.  We use Vonage over Time Warner Cable's broadband service.  You can just plug a phone into the adapter, or plug existing phone wiring in your house into it, meaning all your extensions will work.  In most areas you get to keep your existing phone number.

You hook your phone adapter into your cable modem, then hook your router (or your computer) into the phone adapter.  You plug your phones into the adapter and you are done.  For half the price of a land line, VOIP sounds like a no-brainer.

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