How has your experience been with VOIP?

PiratePast40

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I've been using Ring Central for my fax line for a few months and have experienced a few problems. I noticed today that there was no connection so started to do some troubleshooting. I could get into the softphone softward but no live info. Finally called customer support and we had to change the port and reset the internet access settings for that particular site.

I'm contemplating changing my business voice line to VOIP as well but a little leery after my recent experience with VOIP as my fax line. Faxes are becoming rare so the occasional hiccup isn't too disruptive. but having those outages with a voice line is unacceptable.

Anyone else have any experiences or problems to share before I take the leap?
 

rbh

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

A phones a phone and a computer is a computer, well it used to be and for the most part should stay that way unless you have a huge pipe (internet connection) coming into your home or business.
Dropped calls, jitter and echo seem to be the big issue with voip, maybe do to the fact of to small a pipe, router is not very good when it comes to voip capability, or could be the wireing is rough (high resistance)

If it where me, I would stay traditional, but shop it.

It seems the people that benefit from it the most are big companys that do huge amounts of voice traffic between sites as well as when their people move intercompany and can take their number with them.
 

britisher

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

I have used Vonage for several years now and never experienced any hiccups on service. When we had a printer with fax capability, it worked fine even as a dual function line. After the printer/fax died, we gave up on faxes altogether. Just scan and email everything. I find very, very few reason to fax anything these days.
Then there's Magic Jack and that's even more a story of low cost technology.
 

lamphega

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

Been using Vonage for about 5 years with no problems but I have only faxed out.
 

tpenfield

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

I implemented a VoIP phone system at my place of work . . . . Does that count?

Fully integrated with the computers, etc.

it is wicked awesome. Btw
 

MTboatguy

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

Been using a Magic jack for several years now with no problems at all.
 

PiratePast40

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

Based on the comments from you guys, maybe I was being a little paranoid. Any problems with clipping, echoes, or dropped calls?

I have Comcast as my ISP and routinely run 5-7 mbps down so don't think bandwidth will be a problem.

Any experiences with RingCentral on just a single line?
 

southkogs

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

I used Vonage for several years, and then about 3 years ago (I think) switched to Magic Jack. If it weren't for the fact that I've had a couple of noticeable Comcast outages, I'd have never noticed a service difference between VOIP and traditional land lines.

I don't know RingCentral at all, but Vonage had some very cool features that I would love in a business phone.
 

Jonnybbad

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

Obihai Technology - Home Check this out. I've been using the free google voice service with an old Obi110 (costed me $50) for 2.5 years now and had three poor quality calls and that's it. You're gonna want to use it with a router that has the feature known as "QoS" or "Quality of Service" and set the voip box to top priority so it always get bandwidth priority over other thing on your network.
 

oldjeep

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

We've had VOIP at the office for years with no issues and my home phone runs over the cable (Mediacomm provided service) - also with no issues. I've got a fax on the line and it doesn't care.
 

PiratePast40

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

I pulled the trigger today and switched my landline over to VOIP. I wanted a cordless phone and they didn't offer one so just bought the adapter for my existing phone.

Should have it set up in the next week or so.
 

britisher

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

I pulled the trigger today and switched my landline over to VOIP. I wanted a cordless phone and they didn't offer one so just bought the adapter for my existing phone.

Should have it set up in the next week or so.

Don't understand that at all. I have never had to buy a special phone for Vonage. We have Brighthouse Cable with internet. That comes in via the coax and the Brighthouse box. I had to disconnect the Phone company connection inside the phone box, then that means you can use your Vonage thru all the phone outlets. I have a mix of phone wire phones and cordless all on the Vonage
 

PiratePast40

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

But don't you have a Vonage box somewhere that acts as an adapter? I think that you would need some way to convert the phone signals to Voip and vice versa. The Voip phones do that or you can use an adapter and use a regular phone. At least that's the way I understand it to work.
 

rbh

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

But don't you have a Vonage box somewhere that acts as an adapter? I think that you would need some way to convert the phone signals to Voip and vice versa. The Voip phones do that or you can use an adapter and use a regular phone. At least that's the way I understand it to work.

You can use a VOIP phone with the card/box they give you (I think), but there may be an issue using a POTS (plain old telephone set).

A voip phone is digital, while a POTS phone (DTMF) is analog.

(kinda like why you cant send/recieve faxes over a cell network)
 

Insteada

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

We've been with XO for a while, but the quality and stability has degraded to where we have problems with faxes almost 50% of the time and there are echos with the call quality. We have a T1 coming in for the signal and use cable for outgoing internet, so we aren't conducting both across the same field. XO has admitted that their service is not very compatible with older (read 3yrs +) fax machines because of the consistency of the signal causing failure. We can't wait to get away and already have the cable folks installing a POTS line to eventually move in that direction.
 

britisher

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

But don't you have a Vonage box somewhere that acts as an adapter? I think that you would need some way to convert the phone signals to Voip and vice versa. The Voip phones do that or you can use an adapter and use a regular phone. At least that's the way I understand it to work.

OK, I understand your confusion.
On the 'phone box' on the outside of the house is the 'IN' connection from the phone company. Go inside that box and pull their 'in' connector. That disconnects anything of theirs going into your house and confusing the signals from Vonage. Our cable company (Brighthouse) supply us with an internet router based on us just using their internet & TV service. (we used to take up their phone service before switching to Vonage and the router they supplied then was different to incorporate the phone jacks). Still with me? Vonage supply their own router for their phone service for you to connect your phone(s). We also have a wifi network in the house, so we have a 3rd box which is the network router.
The way I have it all connected is:
Router #1 (Brighthouse TV/Internet Box)
IN: Incoming co-ax cable for the TV & Internet.
OUT: BLUE Vonage cable to the Vonage Router
Router #2 (Vonage Box)
Their box is color coded to make it easy (unless you're color blind). 2 sockets (1 x Blue, 1 x Yellow) and 2 Phone jacks (Light Green)
Blue Socket: Blue Cable from the Brighthouse Router.
Yellow Socket: Yellow Cable to the 3rd Router (WiFi Network)
Light Green Socket: Phone jack to the Phone IN on POWER EXTENSION for proof against power surges. All the plugs for the routers and pc are plugged in here also.
Router #3 (Wifi Network)
This handles the PC, printer. It does not have any connection to the Phone.
POWER EXTENSION
On the side of the Extension Box are 2 phone jacks, IN and OUT. As already explained the Phone jack from the Vonage Router is plugged in to the IN. On the OUT socket, I have a triple plug in socket extension. From that I run 1 phone jack into the wall jack and the other 2 run to 2 phones I have on 2 nearby desks (all this is in my home office. I have a cordless plugged into another wall jack in the kitchen. Everything runs sweet.
Fax: I did have a Brother Fax/Printer in the pre-Wifi system. You simply connect the phone to the fax and the fax to the Vonage, like adding another connection in the system. However the Fax died and I decided not to replace it. I could sort it for the PC to act as a fax, but I'd have to buy a component for the PC and can't be bothered.
You don't have to bother with using an EXTENSION OUTLET and plugging the phone through that. We do in Florida due to power surges during storms. If you didn't bother with that, you'd simply plug the phone jack from the Vonage Router into your nearest wall jack and that sends the signal round the phone wiring in your house.
What with 3 routers, I printer and a PC and a Monitor, it's like a plumber's nightmare by my desk, but the only people who see it are me and the dust bunnies!!
Hope this helps
 

PiratePast40

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

(kinda like why you cant send/recieve faxes over a cell network)

Actually, you can receive a fax over a cell network using softphone software as long as your landline fax number is set up that way. The way I've been doing it for the last few months is with RingCentral. I had them port my fax landline over to the VOIP network. Now, when faxes come in, they are image files and I can open through the desktop or through my cell. When sending faxes, I use the scan feature on my printer to make it an image file and then send it via the RingCentral softphone. At the other end, it gets converted to analog if received by a fax machine or as an image file by their software.

Don't mean to sound like I'm pushing any particular brand. I'm sure the other services have similar features. I just happened to use this particular one because I saw a lot of their advertising and the reviews looked good.

britisher - thanks for the explanation of how it works. Now I understand why they say you are using your existing home wiring for multiple phones.

Funny how your knowledge profile ramps up when you start to get involved. Then you reach a plateau and just want the thing to work!
 

PiratePast40

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

For what it's worth, my experience with RingCentral has been a nightmare so far. Their operators don't know what they're doing when they make changes to your router or modem. They actually blocked my other Star2Star system from access and shut it off. They also opened up unsecured ports on the router. I had to have Comcast come out and replace the modem and then had to buy a new wireless router.

They then spent over 2 hours messing with the router settings. The person on the other end didn't have a clue what they were doing and the supervisor wasn't much help either. It was obvious that they were looking at the cheat sheet for the first time. It would have been easy to configure ports if they had just released the phones IP address to me and had me research how to set it up.

Then today the voicemail message became the standard message and I lost several important business calls.

My advice is to do yourselves a favor and just have all your calls forwarded to your cell phone. From a business perspective, it's better to try to juggle multiple calls on the cell phone than use one of these crackerjack systems with people that hardly know how to speak English. These VOIP systems are an expensive joke.

Rant over, I feel better now - thanks.
 

rbh

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

YUP!
All I can add is that I wanted 2 incoming lines for our business phone system in our house and shop, and there was no way I wanted to go VOIP, so I kept my landline and got a POTS adapter with blue tooth for my cell (because it only works in one corner of the house, poor reception), plumbed them into a Norstar system and added a star talk flash voice mail system to it.
So I can have a conversation now and so can the other people here and we never loose a message.
 

salty87

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Re: How has your experience been with VOIP?

switched my business to VOIP last year or so. it was very frustrating at first. then I was told our router wasn't compatible. once everything got ironed out it's been very reliable. the biggest problem is losing internet (time warner) which seems to happen alot...too much. we now have a backup for that.

i ended up calling someone to come help get it all working together seamlessly and haven't had an issue in months. hang in there.
 
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