I've been hearing rumblings of the Washington Post doing a comparative story on VoIP, taking into account the three major players that have emerged. Vonage, Packet8 and AT&T's Call Vantage.
In reading the story that ran today, I have to say it is one of the most fair and honest reviews on VoIP seen to date. The reporter, Rob Pegoraro did a very good job of telling the story in easy to understand wording, and seem to clearly articulate the features and benefits, as well as any shortcomings.
Candidly, I'm not surprised that AT&T came out first with CallVantage. As said before, they can't afford to lose. His disection of both Vonage and Packet8 .
I love his line about Vonage, "Vonage's adapter is supposed to reserve enough bandwidth for voice calls, even at the cost of slowing down Web surfing, but in this case it did not. Louis Holder, Vonage's vice president for product development, suggested the adapter was defective, something he said happened a "very low number" of times.
PLEEESE....Give me a break. I've been pointing this out to Vonage PR for months, almost since the very start of my service with them. If defective really is the case, then why didn't the always responsive team at Vonage, Brook Schulz and Mitchell Slepian offer to replace it for me. Sorry, that doesn't hold water. I have a colleague overseas who has a Vonage box and experiences the very same thing with his service, and he's on DSL and the kids are always on line.
His comment about CallVantage was interesting. But AT&T's call quality far surpassed that of Vonage. The adapter kept voice traffic flowing -- even if it sometimes slowed my downloads more than seemed necessary -- with only a few garbled words.
I haven't experienced the garbled voice traffic, and found that AT&T's packet shaping and traffic prioritizing, seemed to benefit me more on the outbound, where Cox cable caps me at 256 (well I usually get 237k according to speed tests) than affecting me on the inbound.
Here's hat's off to a reporter who got it right. Well done.
Guess what, still another day trying to get my stupid voip box working. Last night was an hour on hold, and when the help person tried to help, she couldn't. Someone was supposed to call me back, which they didn't) so here i sit again on hold to try to activate. spend your money on something more worth-while like an icescraper in the bahamas!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: Aaron | January 26, 2005 at 05:24 PM
If your computer does not automatically detect everything for you,,,,,,, GOOD LUCK!
Posted by: aaron | January 25, 2005 at 02:18 PM
Call advantage may have some impressive features, but, for someone who is not a techno geek it has serious problems.
1.) Instuctions on how to have every phone in a house connected is a mystery.
2.) power outages!!!!! ouch !@@#$
3.) Set up is not as simply as implied - can one sue for this one?
Posted by: Judith Majher | December 30, 2004 at 08:30 PM
Your article in the WP has made it to both verizon and sbc yahoo stock BB. Way to go.
Posted by: ron reagan | July 18, 2004 at 11:32 AM