what is Vonage?

Question

what is vonage?? i saw on comercials what it was and i heard it was better than DSL. our comp laggs sometimes and the internet doesnt work for days sometimes. so we are gonna cut off DSL soon and switch to something. can we replace DSL with Vonage? whatis vonage anyway? thank you!

Answer 1

Vonage will NOT IN ANY WAY help you here.

Vonage is a phone company that uses the general public Internet as the voice carrier. They cannot assure voice quality and NO carrier who uses the general internet for voice quality can.

You need a broadband connection with an upload speed of at least 256 Kbps to have any hope of a decent voice signal.

If you have DSL and it worked well for you, you could not retire your existing phone company as the DSL would go away and you would not have any broadband Internet for you to transport the voice.

Vonage and its rivals talk of lower cost service, no long distance fee, and other services that cost more with most traditional telephone companies. However they do not have to cover transport costs because they use the Internet. They claim to use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for transport but they fail to tell you they cannot provide voice packet priority, bandwidth allocation, and all the other Quality of Service (QoS) aspects that is required of VoIP. They cannot provide QoS over the Internet; no one can as the Internet does not have any means to do so.

I am sure others will comment about their success with a VoIP service that uses the Internet. For every one that likes it, at least one other has discontinued it because it is not reliable.

No I do not work for the Telephone company. I do put in VoIP connections for business where we can control QoS on the LAN and on leased point - point lines.

For you, Vonage voice service will not help.

Answer 2

Vonage is a VOIP provider.
Voice over Internet Protocol. That means your phone calls are sent over the internet.
Vonage spent a lot on advertising and is still losing money. They were sued by Verizon for patent infringment and lost. It looked like they were going to go out of business but they somehow are not closed down yet.
Its just lawers and judges now.
I would not trust them at this point, since they could shut down any day. There was a similar company SunRocket that DID just go out of business after collecting year long advanced fees from thousands of customers.

VOIP can be much cheaper than POTS (plain old telephone service. I picked Verizon, since they are so big and will be around for a long time.
https://www22.verizon.com/ForYourHome/VOIP/VOIPHome.aspx

But make sure you have a good ISP. I have Verizon FIOS with plenty of bandwidth for VOIP. With Low level DSL call quality may be a problem.

Answer 3

Vonage is a VoIP (voice over internet protocol) company. It allows you to make voice phone calls that are packetized and sent over the internet. It my opinion, it only makes sense if you make a LOT of phone calls, say typically racking up land line long distance bills of $80 or more.

It has no applicability for your poor internet performance.

Answer 4

vonage is a phone company.