RIP phone line
Replaced my land line with VOIP from AT&T last night. It feels weird in a nice way. I remember struggling 8 years back on a 64kbps link to the Internet and something like VOIP would've been a pipe dream. And now here it is getting into the hands of consumers. Yeah, I know I am probably a little late to the bandwagon and VOIP from Vonage etc. have been here for some time now. Anyways...so, now I have one cable through which I get standard TV, HDTV, 3Mbps connectivity and my telephony. Neat!

It is over a D-Link VOIP gateway that uses H.323 (same like Netmeeting) and SIP. I was a little bummed that I can't run it behind my NAT/firewall; it has to sit between my cable modem and the NAT for two reasons - H.323 doesn't use fixed ports which basically requires me to open all the ports for inbound traffic or filter by protocol (expensive). Second, the gateway does QoS to ensure that I get 90kbps (KBps?) up and down (to the extent they can) and they won't be able to do that if it is on my LAN while I am playing Xbox Live. So, I have to live with an extra hop (still looking for ways to eliminate that).

Good features - voicemail over the web, vmail fwding over email, routing of calls, etc. and good rates. Free domestic and 17c to India. Voice quality is like landline with no discernible lag - a slight hush in the background once in a while though. More on the quality later.

Vonage offers some interesting features like virtual phone numbers. So, if I have family in Boston who calls me often then I get a Boston number for a small fee and my family calling me dials local. Interesting things one can do over an IP network. They support some international numbers as well. And they also support calling from your PC via the SoftPhone. Kaushik, you guys should probably hook up with some of these VOIP guys.

posted by Farookh at 11:22 AM Comment (0)