Alston Grove

I was at CompUSA to pick up some cables and I ended up making an impulse buy: a Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter for Vonage. I’d been researching Vonage, AT&T CallVantage, and Packet8, but my wife says I spend too much time on decisions, so I’m trying to change.

The PAP2 is very small, like two decks of cards, and it has an ethernet jack and two RJ11 phone jacks (for two separate phone numbers). I plugged it into my Linksys switch and patched the “phone 1″ into my house panel. Since I put the phone adapter behind my firewall, I had to add a few rules to let VoIP packets through, which the manual kindly provided.

I went to the Vonage website and activated my adapter. One nice thing about VoIP is you can pick the area code your phone number will orginate from. If your parents live in South Carolina, you can get a number that is local to them. I kept it simple and chose a Columbus number, but I might add another number later. Right after I activated, the phone LED lit up, and I had a dial tone. I didn’t have to take a day off from work to wait for some telco guy!

I’ve been using it for a couple days, and I must say I am impressed. My wife hasn’t complained, so I know it’s decent. The voice quality is good and the service has been flawless. It comes with standard features like caller ID, 3-way calling, call waiting, and even voice mail. You can use their website to track calls, check voice mail, add features, and configure settings. The price for all of this is pretty unbelievable. We were paying $35/month for a line, and $75/month for long distance. Now we pay $15/month. It makes me feel like the big telcos have been cheating me all along.

Vonage doesn’t require a contract, so I could eventually switch providers. CallVantage has some interesting features, like Do Not Disturb. Packet8 most interests me for their Virtual Office. Really, I need to run Asterick and connect it to my VoIP provider, and I’d have all the PBX features I could imagine.