Comments on: Big Changes Coming for Cellphone Industry

By: Django Bliss

Django Bliss — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:49:54 +0000

Suprisingly, I don't miss having a cell phone in the car, and especially don't miss having it while out and about doing errands. So I guess the VOIP works well in those places :) Maybe in 5 or 10 years when cars are internet enabled, I'll have the same VOIP account routed to the car as well.

Packet8 has a box that sits on my local network, just plug in the ethernet, the regular phone and it was basically ready to go. It had no problems with getting through my linux box/firewall or my linksys router when I tried that configuration.

By: DC Loser

DC Loser — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 16:00:21 +0000

How does your VOIP work in your car? :)

Is Packet 8 one of these setups that use a router?

By: Django Bliss

Django Bliss — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:49:13 +0000

We love our VOIP setup. We use Packet8 and it's $20/month for unlimited nationwide. We've never had any service or quality problems and the only time the sound quality goes down is when I'm already using up all the bandwidth with a heavy download or upload.

I also chose them because I wanted a VOIP box that sat right on my home network and NOT between my cable modem and the Internet or the cable modem and my network. I have enough latency without adding another box with a weak processor in it.

Before having VOIP we hadn't had a land line in 4 years, using only cell. Now we've dropped our cell phones and use only the VOIP. I must say, getting rid of the cell phones was a great move.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 15:02:42 +0000

Take a look at Sunrocket http://www.sunrocket.com. I just signed up with them. A box plugged inbetween my cable modem and router, a regular telephone plugged into the box, and I can make unlimited local and long-distance phone calls for $25 a month or $200 a year.

So far the only problem so far is that about %50 of the time the call sounds a little echo-y or scratchy.

And we actually signed up because we make so few phone calls that the $40 or more we were paying for local+basic long distance seemed ridiculous, and we'd rather do this than go cell-only.

By: DC Loser

DC Loser — Mon, 24 Jan 2005 14:53:15 +0000

Just the other day I was reading an article, I believe it was in the WSJ or something similar that said consumers weren't signing up for VOIP service in numbers that the industry was expecting. Basically it was too much bother for most and they are essentially happy with their current setup and couldn't be bothered to make the switch, unless they made an unusually large number of long distance and overseas calls. To me, VOIP is a nice idea but right now requires too much work to set up and maintain.