jersey_born
join:2002-01-02
Hawthorne, NJ
|  reply to LordMalak
Re: Alot of players in this field
I have both Vonage and AT&T Call Vantage... both have great phone quality but at a different cost. Vonage uses a Motorola box that works either as the gateway for your computer network or as a device behind a router/firewall. AT&T uses a D-Link device that "requires" to be directly connected to your modem. Recently I had a bandwidth problem with AT&T that forced me to move it to a dedicated IP on my T-1. Seems that when I was using the phone service my OptOnline bandwidth was what I expected. But once I hung up the call, I lost 80% of my bandwidth and under a test of AOL 9.0 while downloading a huge video file, it reset the VoIP Gateway completely... tier 2 tech support is still looking into it at last check and I suspect it has to do with the hardware not that I think the D-Link box is that bad... I find AT&Ts feature set to be right up there with the rest of them and they were able to port over my former Verizon phone number which to me was an added plus. |
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WhyADuck
Premium
join:2003-03-05
| I really, really dislike the idea of a box that MUST be directly connected to a modem. What if you are in some sort of shared living situation and your only access point is behind a router? What if you want to take your box to work and plug it into the network connection at your desk? What if you want two or more VoIP lines, perhaps from competing VoIP providers (so you have redundancy if one goes down)? I can probably think of a couple dozen reasons why a requirement that the VoIP device be connected directly to the modem is a very bad thing. It would be as if hard drive manufacturers all required that their hard drives be the first device on the first IDE cable in any computer - that would be okay until you wanted to add a second hard drive, then you would curse whoever came up with that scheme.
Of course, I'm not sure why anyone would want CallVantage anyway, when it is nearly the most expensive VoIP provider out there. If it's features you want, VoicePulse has them at a much lower monthly rate, and there are quite a few other companies that also offer a better deal than CallVantage on the monthly rate. |
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