one of the cool things about building a home from scratch is that i am not forced into using existing infrastructure and can try out new technologies. something i’ve been itching to try out is how voice over internet protocal (VoIP) phones actually work and if they can replace real phones. so we decided to sign up for vonage.

if you haven’t heard about VoIP, it’s basically converting your phone call into packets, sending it across the net and then converting it back at the destination phone network. it’s not actually that new because most phone companies are already using a packet switching network for long distance calls since it doesn’t waste excess capacity in the system (yay for learning stuff in school). so the only new step in the chain is that my phone calls are converted to packets in my house instead of down the street.

the setup was pretty easy, you put the AT hardware between your modem and your router. the box magically performs QoS (quality of service) on the connection so you at least have some sort of ability to hold a conversation while you’re pirating movies. next, you plug your phones into this box and magically (again), you have a dial tone and you can make long distance calls for free! ain’t the marvel of technology grand?

then we realized we had some problems. see after, we got the phone working our internet seemingly died. we could still connect to the router over wifi no problem, but we couldn’t connect to the internet. anyways, after some brainstorming; it turns out that the VoIP box automatically reserved the ip address 192.168.0.1 for itself, which coincidentally is the same ip that the router reserved for itself. now i think this is a stupid design on the part of the makers of the box (which wouldn’t be the first time that motorola has shown bad design skillz) since 1) most routers choose 192.168.0.1 as their ip 2) you can’t change the ip on the VoIP box. i guess no on at motorola has a home network.

anyways, the most worrisome part of being an early adopter of VoIP technology is the sound quality. this isn’t entirely the fault of the hardware as the bandwidth of the internet connection plays into it, but the hardware could also have encoding properties that better mirror vocal patterns. i’m happy to say that while it’s not as clear as a normal phone call, it is better than most long distance phone cards (which are probably packet switched anyways!). one draw back is that if your internet goes down, you’re screwed. especially if you have to call 911. i also found it funny that there was a feature where you can lock out the 911 number.

so my final verdict is yes, voip is ready for prime time especially considering i can get unlimited local and long distance dialing in north america, call waiting, call display, name display, voicemail, email notification of voicemail, conference call, call forwarding, and call return all for $30 a month with decent voice quality.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky