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pogo
09-04-2006, 20:30
Just wondering if anybody has or is using vontage at the moment and if so is it any good, as the £7.99 package looks quite atractive.

brainier
09-04-2006, 20:49
You mean Vonage. Yes, have been using it for about 8 months and is now even better with the £2 a month price drop. We had two NTL phone lines and the unlimited calls package at a total of over £30 a month. We now pay nearer £20 for two residential Vonage numbers.

Only problem is the Vonage router - it does not allow VPN inbound through it, and that has been an issue a few times. Outbound, no problems though.

pogo
09-04-2006, 21:50
Thanks, I think I`ll give it a try.

DaggaDagga
09-04-2006, 22:17
Had it for nearly a year. I thought it was 80% as good voice quality as a BT or NTL line - fairly acceptable. She Who Must Be Obeyed complained frequently about "walkie-talkie" sound etc.

The voicemail is superb - you get an email with a wav file recording.

In the end we got rid of it, as it was £10 per month then. This was only slightly less than BT or NTL, so we went back to an NTL line.

Of course, it will only work when your BB works (may be a problem with NTL BB these days). And it will bite a chunk out of your upstream data rate.

All in all, I'm happier to pay only a bit more for a "proper" phone line. If you call abroad a lot then it probably makes sense though.

BIG WARNING: Read their small print before signing up. They charge a DISconnection fee when you leave. I didn't bother paying it when I left and they seem to have left me alone. They terminated my line before the paid-for month was up, so I didn't think it was fair for me to give them any more money.

Matthew
09-04-2006, 22:24
I am with them and giving it a go for a few months and it seems ok.

DaggaDagga how much is the disconnection fee just out of interest?

pogo
09-04-2006, 23:03
Disconnection fee looks to be £29.98

paul11974
10-04-2006, 00:06
i think the carphone warehouse has the next big thing up its sleeve

etccarmageddon
10-04-2006, 00:57
go with sipgate - it's better value and has no disconnection fee.

paul11974
10-04-2006, 01:29
go with sipgate - it's better value and has no disconnection fee.

£0.00 a month but they charge 1.19p per minute to uk landlines where vonage is £6.99 with free uk landline calls

http://www.sipgate.co.uk/user/tarife.php

---------- Post added at 00:29 ---------- Previous post was at 00:24 ----------

sipgate = Seychelles 17.8 p/min

vonage = Seychelles £0.14 p/min

DaggaDagga
10-04-2006, 10:58
I tried Sipgate after Vonage, via a VOIP ATA router.

In my experience, it was useless. Voice quality was far lower than Vonage, and we couldn't call in or out to phone lines on weekday evenings (peak time, I guess). It would have been a big money-saver, but it's no good saving a few quid to be impossible to contact.

I also found it cut off frequently, once I had managed to make a call.

All together, we used Vonage for nearly a year (acceptable). Then we tried Sipgate and VOIPStunt (both useless). The VOIP ATA router will be going on Ebay this week from 1p with no reserve!

paul11974
10-04-2006, 11:38
I tried Sipgate after Vonage, via a VOIP ATA router.

In my experience, it was useless. Voice quality was far lower than Vonage, and we couldn't call in or out to phone lines on weekday evenings (peak time, I guess). It would have been a big money-saver, but it's no good saving a few quid to be impossible to contact.

I also found it cut off frequently, once I had managed to make a call.

All together, we used Vonage for nearly a year (acceptable). Then we tried Sipgate and VOIPStunt (both useless). The VOIP ATA router will be going on Ebay this week from 1p with no reserve!

so your overall rating of voip is marks out of 10 please

DaggaDagga
10-04-2006, 13:22
so your overall rating of voip is marks out of 10 please

Vonage: 6/10 at old price, probably 7/10 at new price. Call quality not great, but usually bearable.

Sipgate: 1/10 as it hardly ever worked. Dalek voice quality sometimes when it did work.

VOIPStunt: 1/10, as above.

NTL phone line (5p call plan): 9/10 - works all the time, costs only a little bit more.

This is from my personal experience. We're not heavy phone users, and don't call abroad. I've heard others say Sipgate is great. Perhaps I was unlucky, perhaps my expectations are higher than some (I expect it to work all the time!).

Vonage is plug-and-play. The others do require that you're comfortable messing about with settings etc.

It's possibly of use as a second line if you call abroad. Other than that, it's an interesting idea but of little everyday use.

The NTL line is the only one that's caused zero complaints from the other half! She doesn't care about how clever it is, just whether it works and whether you can hear the person on the other end.

brundles
10-04-2006, 15:21
VOIP can work well but it's not a simple case of plug and play.

Different providers use different codecs with different qualities - if you're using G711 with a good provider then you probably won't notice the difference. (We've been using a variety of VOIP providers over the last few months while I find the most suitable and in general friends and family haven't known.) The only other thing that can be a pain is that different VOIP providers use different DTMF transmission settings so you need to find out the right one there to be able to use those god awful touch tone menus companies are so fond of with 0870 numbers.

In terms of upstream bandwidth, if you have 256k upstream or greater you won't have any problems. The catch to that is if you use P2P then you will need to make sure you have good QoS settings.

We had a lot of problems with SIPGate (dropped calls, not routing in properly) and it seems to be a common theme across a number of forums, but other providers have proved much better.

paul11974
10-04-2006, 15:32
Vonage: 6/10 at old price, probably 7/10 at new price. Call quality not great, but usually bearable.

Sipgate: 1/10 as it hardly ever worked. Dalek voice quality sometimes when it did work.

VOIPStunt: 1/10, as above.

NTL phone line (5p call plan): 9/10 - works all the time, costs only a little bit more.

This is from my personal experience. We're not heavy phone users, and don't call abroad. I've heard others say Sipgate is great. Perhaps I was unlucky, perhaps my expectations are higher than some (I expect it to work all the time!).

Vonage is plug-and-play. The others do require that you're comfortable messing about with settings etc.

It's possibly of use as a second line if you call abroad. Other than that, it's an interesting idea but of little everyday use.

The NTL line is the only one that's caused zero complaints from the other half! She doesn't care about how clever it is, just whether it works and whether you can hear the person on the other end.


well as long as the mrs is happy