Vonage is not really a telephone company as you have an internet provider to use them .Right?

Answer 1

It depends upon how you define a phone company.

Vonnage and many other similar companies use the Internet for transport. Calls are dialed out and received in by the normal means.

The difference is the transport is over the Internet. This greatly lowers the cost to Vonnage so they can claim to be less expensive but you are paying for the broadband service to someone else.

All carriers who use the Internet for transport cannot guarentee voice quality. Voice requires packet transfer, in order and within 125 msec of sending for acceptable quality. This requires voice packets to be marked for priority AND dispatched through the route with priority. When congestion occurs and packets back up, the transit time cannot be assured and packet loss can happen. With voice packet delay or loss, voice quality becomes unacceptable.

For a managed network, the Voice over Internet Protocol works well only because voice is marked for and given priority over data to assure voice quality. This requires network hardware that is able to handle the priority marks as well.

The Internet is not able to provide voice packet priority and does not do this. When congestion happens, voice suffers markedly and often to an unacceptable degree.

Vonnage and similar providers claim that a voice quality problem is due to undersized Internet gateway speed and they recommend boosting gateway speed as the only needed cure. In fact, if the internet speed is too slow for voice it is too slow for voice always, not sporadically. If it is too slow for voice periodically it is in fact a result of congestion and the inability to handle voice with priority.

While the lure of promised low long distance costs is attractive, you need to balance this against more costly network hardware and often more costly internet gateway speed. Consider also that voice quality is not assured and perhaps it is not a bargain at all.

Answer 2

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Answer 3

Yes you do need an Internet connection to use it so You would have to have something like cable or dry DSL. I have it and it works great plus you can check your voice mail through the web which is kind of nice. I think I pay something like $27 after tax and everything so it is a much better deal than the phone company.

Answer 4

It _is_ a telephone company in that it is capable of completing calls coming into/going out of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The fact that you need an ISP for you to access them is as consequential as the fact that cellular phone companies use RF to connect handsets to the towers that carry the call down to a switched network. It's just another path into the PSTN, the same one landlines utilize.

Answer 5

this complete internet Neutrality debate is fairly stupid. purely because of the fact information superhighway vendors have stated doing this it does not propose they are able to certainly do it. in case you recognize the way broadband networks paintings you may even see that imposing something like that must be heavily confusing. If there grow to be purely one enterprise somewhat of extra desirable than one offering information superhighway service we'd have a situation yet there is extra desirable than one. If one decides to do it they are going to be dropped by using maximum of their describers. the huge delusion approximately this going around is that information superhighway is slowing down because of new technologies. it quite is stupid. If it starts to decelerate they'll locate the thank you to maintain it going as this is. They already have new technologies arranged for it. this is in the internet vendors proper activity to try this. i'm against the FCC having a good number of anymore involvement in the internet. The Federal commerce fee has already stated they are going after bloggers for promoting issues. what's to end the FCC from doing the main suitable comparable factor that internet Neutrality is assume to "shield" us from?