So here I sit, in Idaho, blogging about a nifty keen device. I
We’re with Vonage. We’ve talked about switching to Comcast’s VoIP service a few times, but it hasn’t been something really compelling (saving maybe $10 a month), and we’re a little concerned about portability. Anyway, there are a couple of neat features that I really like: 1. Plug into any IP network, and you have your regular phone line going 2. If for any reason our VoIP adapter is down, phone calls get forwarded to my wife’s cell phone.
We hauled our phone-adapter up with us in order to be able to include my sister-in-law on the Christmas celebrations over the phone. That way, we could just call her and keep her on speakerphone as long as the batteries last so that she’s a part of the family for the gift-opening and stuff.
Christy’s family is contentious, but close. Kinda’ weird, but I suspect most families are kinda’ weird under the hood.
So on the way up to Idaho today, Christy gets a call. I hear her explain to the person that we’re on our way to Idaho. Obviously, the other person is confused, and apparently said that she thought she called on our home line, not our mobile phone. Christy explains, “Oh, well, yeah, we unplugged our phone. When our phone is unplugged, calls to our home line go to my cell phone. When we get to Idaho, we’re going to plug in our regular phone and get phone calls on our home line up there.”
I could almost hear the silence on the other end of the line as the person digested this statement. I mean, think about it in terms of a regular phone line! If someone told me that, I’d be tempted to say, “Uhm, dude, it really doesn’t work that way.”
But with a VoIP phone, it does. As long as that person has an Internet connection, just plug your phone-adapter in, and you’re off and running. The newer adapters (ours isn’t, unfortunately) don’t even require any special configuration to work through a network-address-translating firewall. As long as the port’s open, they work for two-way communications.
Pretty dang nifty. I’m stoked.
So if any of you call us this weekend to ask to borrow a cup of sugar, be prepared to be put off because, even though we’re answering our home line, we’re not actually home.
I love the twenty-first century. Gimme more!
Do you read Kurzweil?
Your comment about loving the 21st Century just made me think of his latest book: The Singularity is Near.
If you haven’t checked out this one or his other: The Age of Spiritual Machines, you should.
I think you’d dig it. I know I do.
911 Is The Holdback
A little over two years ago I jumped on the early-adopter track for VOIP home telephony service. For $20 less a month than the ILEC Ma Bell basic phone service, I had unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S. via Vonage. I was a happy little tech-geek consumer.
Then, one day, our power went out. No VOIP service. But hey, we had cell phones. I can overcome loss of phone service due to power outages because cell phones handled the call load in the meantime.
Then came the 911 problem. Luckily, it wasn’t myself or anyone in my place that needed to make an emergency call. However, I became aware that a low percentage of 911 calls were going through, qualified only by recognizing that anything less than 99.9% is low when it’s your life on the line (pun intended). A couple weeks ago, an FCC report came out (can’t find it!) detailing how the VOIP services still haven’t met their success rate goals for routing 911 calls. This is one of the main problems.
The other holdback is that Time Warner internet phone just offered their best-deal-ever and it only saved $5 a month from our current Qwest bill. We’ve all moaned on a previous blog about the poor customer service encountered when dealing with Qwest, but their basic phone service hasn’t caused me any problems. Wife Unit feels that paying an extra $60 a year, or missing out on saving an extra $60 a year, for continuing to have 99.9% guaranteed 911 connection through Qwest is worth it.
Also, from a vendor management perspective, I’m not sure I like the idea of bundling all my communication and media services through one vendor. We already have Time Warner internet and cable TV. Loading them up with another service makes us totally dependent on Time Warner for service delivery, fair pricing and competitive product offering.
Meanwhile, Minneapolis is one of the many U.S. cities preparing to offer free wi-fi. I’m thinking about waiting until that hits the streets. It would be cool to work a VOIP line from the downtown office off a second computer, piggy-backing off the city’s wi-fi network.
V-Phone
Matt, I convinced Wife Unit to allow the homestead to switch over to Vonage a couple months ago. I’m back with VOIP. Life is good again.
To echo your point, people get freaked when they call the home line and don’t understand how they reached my cell. It causes some problems in that they tend not to leave voice mails when they believe they reached an unintended number.
http://www.vonage.com/device.php?type=VPHONE
The days of unplugging your router to forward your service or physically carrying your router with you are now over! Talk about slick! Cell phones made land-lines absolete, and this could make cell phones obsolete. For people who live in a city (like MPLS) where high-speed wireless internet access will be made free for tax-paying residents, a V-Phone will be (at this time) one third the price of a regular monthly cell phone bill and give unlimited minutes. You would just need a laptop for access through the V-Phone.
What would be tre’ slick is if Vonage came out with a V-Phone with a wireless card slot…