Downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, as seen from Granville Island. Downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, as seen from Granville Island.

Vancouver, BC, Canada
June 25, 2005
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April 25, 2005

Vonage

Cell service in my new place is not very good (much as I am tempted to blame Verizon, the problem seems consistent across cell providers). Therefore, much as I might like to be cellular-only, I've been thinking that I need to get a landline.

This is a problem. Our local phone company is the ever-evil Qwest, who, despite the untold millions they're spending on their "Spirit Of Service" ads, still cannot seem to spend $0.05 on better training for their call-center staffs. (Oh, and good luck with the accounting scandals, guys.)

My buddy Khan has Vonage, and I've been curious to try it. Vonage competes with Qwest in the local phone business by using VoIP. Effectively, I plug my phone in to the Vonage "box", which then plugs in to my Comcast cable Internet service.

Conceptually, it's wicked cool. Local calls plus national long distance for a flat rate of $25. How can you not love it?

But the devil is in the details with these things, so Khan and I engaged in a lengthy iChat technical support session, wherein I asked him about a bazillion stupid questions. As always, Khan had great answers, but he did recommend that I replace the basic (free) Vonage "box" with an all-singing, all-dancing combo WiFi-Ethernet-router-Vonage device from Linksys (the WRT54GP2).

I'm loathe to swap out network equipment willy-nilly, so I did a little more digging on the Linksys - and sadly, the reviews were terrible. I found this blog entry from Michael Geary, at which point I pretty much decided that the Linksys was a loser.

I've gone ahead and ordered Vonage service, and opted for the free box (sorry, Khan). I'll see how it goes, and will post once I've tried the service for a while.

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at April 25, 2005 8:42 PM. Posted to Geek.

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