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April 26, 2005
How do you pronounce VoIP?
VoIP. VoIP. It's my new phone company. I used to be with Verizon, but now I have VoIP. Er, no, not really. Well, kinda. VoIP is Voice over IP (ie, connect your phone to the internet and save thousands of dollars... no, really!). We have, as Jason corrected me in a previous post, a T-1 at home. Why are we dishing out an additional $80 for local calls, long distance service, callerID, voicemail and call waiting? Seems like a tad much, doesn't it?
I thought so. So we looked at Vonage. You must have seen their prolific ads with all those folks telling their phone companies where to go. But we chose to go with the package offered through the folks who provide us with the T-1, SpeakEasy. And today was the big day for the switch.
Turns out you don't actually call your phone company and tell them where they can put their stupidly high fees. SpeakEasy gets to have all that fun. Since it is inevitable that the joy of telling Verizon to go blow goats would be outweighed by the irritation of navigating their touchtone/voice recognition menu, I guess that's only fair.
The deal is: SpeakEasy sends you equipment you need, and it's yours in a year. If you cancel before then, you get a fine, unless you return the equipment to them (it's unclear whether they'll remind you... I suspect not, but then I may be jaded from my dealings with phone companies).
So the equipment arrived today. Today was also the day our phone number switched ot the new service. Quick turnaround. I only called last week. And Jason plugged us in, and was able to call me at work, after he reconfigured the phone adapter (it came configured for some other IP address, don't know what was up with that). The clarity was reasonably good, and considering it's saving us $55/month, reasonably good is good enough for me.
I think we still need to set up the voicemail, and possibly set it up so that if the broadband goes down, the calls forward over to Jason's cell phone. Yes, this arrangement does mean that if the power goes out, we have no phone, but that was been true already, as all of our phones are portables. With bases that plug in. Think about it, Einstein.
It also means that if Jason is grabbing a ton of podcasts, and I'm trying to talk on the phone, I may sound a little... odd. At which point, I'll yell at Jason that I have no connectivity. This happens all the time when I go to check my email, and I find that the server has no time for me. We may have to do some bandwidth monitoring and limiting so that someone doesn't eat it all for breakfast. Naming no names, of course.
Completely off topic: I laughed at this so hard, I cried.
And for those of you who noticed it, Jason designed the funky N graphic up in your browser's address bar. Contain your excitement, please.
Posted by Nicole at April 26, 2005 01:32 PM