I have finally decided to give Vonage a try. I've been nuts about VoIP since it was first introduced years ago. I truly believe it is the future of all telephony and in the next few years, as broadband speeds increase, you'll see mass adoption. In fact, most people don't realize it, but almost all voice traffic over national carrier networks get put onto an IP/Ethernet backbone in the form of H.323. You're making a VoIP phone call and you don't even know it.

VoIP to the home is simply the next logical step. VoIP will add incredible features to telephony that aren't possible today. Think about your instant messenger software. AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. You're chatting with your buddy and decide to send him a picture, a drawing, video or a link to a website. VoIP will bring all of these same features to your telephone. Imagine talking to grandma and you decide to send her a picture of junior. Its coming! I also believe that VoIP will finally be the transport that makes Video calls a reality. Its coming. Get ready!

With all of this in mind, and being that technology is my career, it only makes sense for me to get on this bandwagon now. Once I've tested and am happy that Vonage will provide good service I plan to drop my land-line POTS from Verizon. I have Verizon business FIOS with 15 Mb/s so bandwidth should never be an issue for me. I also plan on experimenting with Asterisk PBX. A home PBX would be pretty cool.

For now, during my trial period, I only have one phone in the house connected to Vonage. When I am home, I have the POTS line forwarded to Vonage and I make all of my outgoing calls on the Vonage line. So far, it works just as well as my regular POTS line. I haven't noticed any choppiness or lag in the communications. Keep in mind, I have gobs of bandwidth available. If I were running on DSL with 128Kb/s upstream it might not be so good. Especially since I am running a 90 Kb/s stream to Vonage (Vonage allows you to pick three voice quality options to encode your calls: 30, 50 or 90 Kb/s. 30 Kb/s is similar to a cell phone, 50 a standard land-line and 90 is VoIP only - you have to call another VoIP number to hear the difference.) I only picked 90 Kb/s since I have plenty of bandwidth to spare.

I'll post more about this as time goes on..