OMNI - Does anyone use Vonage?

I was thinking of signing up for this service. http://vonage.com Does/has anyone used this company? Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated.

A friend uses it and loves it. From his calls to me, it's about indistinguishable from circuit switched voice. It needs 128k of upstream bandwidth to work though, so you don't want to be running Kazaa lite while using the phone over it. It also has a low bandwidth mode, but that lowers the quality to about cellphone level. Overall, for $40 it's a great deal.

Has anyone tried it for free international calls? like getting a unit with a U.S.phone number and then installing it in another country?

Thanks, does the 128 bandwidth requirement mean that I couldn't surf and talk at the same time?

I was looking at the $25 deal as that's more than I would need.

[This message has been edited by MoreMilesPlease (edited 05-24-2003).]

You can surf while talking. If you happened to get a big burst of data while talking or listening, the quality of the speech might dip slightly. But think of the bad quality you accept on a mobile phone. This is nowhere near that bad.

And yes you can use Vonage internationally. They probably won't give you any quality guarantees though.

There is also Free World Dial which is run by a friend. Free is a good thing! http://www.freeworldialup.com/

The upstream bandwidth is what's important. Most broadband connections have at least 384k downstream so that's more than enough to surf and talk at the same time. You wouldn't want to be sending a large Email attachment while you're on the phone though. Also, I believe certain routers (Linksys is one that comes to mind) can do IP traffic prioritization and make sure that even if you are doing everything that the voice traffic gets priority.

Thanks everyone. I think we're going to try this service after Verizon screwed up our extra phone line. Will post after using it for a bit.