does anyone here use VOIP phone service
 

as in Vonage or any of the others? If so how is your service? How does it sound compared to your traditional POTS line? I'm thinking of making the switch.

Personally me and a friend of mine have voice conversations using Yahoo Messenger. The quality is very good even though she lives in Toronto and I live in Austrailia. We both have broadband. =)

I'm testing VOIP now
 

I am currently one of the test participants in Illinois for VOIP. The
test trial will run another 10 days or so and hopefully if all goes well,
VOIP will be opened up to the public within IL. I am testing for one of the big phone companies (you figure it out) and they are in the process of moving into many states. The price seems right because in the end you will most likely receive both local and long distance within the U.S. = unlimited.

From my standpoint, VOIP has been great. The sound quality has been fantastic. There are so many features that you can use (personal conferencing, locate me (up to 5 different phones that will all ring at once or one at a time.. that you choose), call logs, do not disturb (will allow emergency calls to go through by pushing a button on the phone), call forwarding, dialing from the web, having your VOIP phone notify you by sending you a text message to your cell phone when you have received a message, ability to listen to you email messages on the web.... a friend left a 77 second message that ran about 830K (quality was very good though).

The sound is very comparable to a POTS line. I'm told, although I haven't done the test yet, that if you are on the phone while using broadband, that it significantly reduces your online speed... just told... I haven't tested yet. I made a call to my parents a couple of nights back and talked for around 25 minutes or so (I could look it up on the log if I wanted to) and I only told them about the VOIP phone as I was about to hang up... course that produced another 10 minutes of call time (they live in Canada) but they did not have a clue that I was using VOIP over the standard phone that I usually use.

I have a choice when all is said and done if I want to keep VOIP or use my existing POTS line. I gotta tell you that I dig VOIP and all the features that it offers over a standard pots service.

One thing that has really been bugging me though... the manual that I received with the TA (telephone adapter) unit said that the TA will only work with Windows or Mac. I was out to prove them wrong and show that it could be used with Linux. I have RedHat 9. Unfortunately RedHat 9 now stalls at the bootup process (when at eth0).. it eventually boots up but I do not have access to the internet.... course the VOIP works only cuz it was originally initialized through Windows.... but I can't get the internet to work any longer in RH9. ARGH!!! Any help would be much appreciated to find a way to get the internet to work through RH9. Originally I was getting floating point exception errors and now my eth0 will just not activate when I am trying to use the network configuration tool. :Pengy:

Re: does anyone here use VOIP phone service
 

WE are actually using Vonage at work, and it works quite well, But you must have a good internet connection, if your broadband service is spotty, you won't get good results, and you need 90K/line so if you are on the phone with it and do heavy barrel downloading at the same time, you may expierience some problems.

ALl in all its been great, i think i'm going to have it installed at home as well.

i've had vonage since december and cancelled my main telephone service ..im paying 24.99 for telephone service and im very pleased remember that the company technology is new and bare with any difficulties they may have in the future.
but if i leave music sharing programs open on the system it really ticks off my vonage box and i got to power it off then on again.
other then that ive been happy and wont go back to verizon