I have vonage and i think its a great way to save money on your phone bill. I have never had any problems with it. I would get rid of the home phone completely if it wasnt for my wife. Unlimited local/long distance, voice mail, caller id, call waiting, call forwarding, call block and more for $30 a month is a great deal compared to Bellsouth. IIRC our Bellsouth bill every month just for phone and long distance (no extras like caller id call waiting etc) was about $80 a month.
I don't use VoIP at home but my office system is all AVAYA VoIP and it flat out rocks! We have over 1000 people on it everyday and no problems. Call quality is awesome as we use the new wideband codec G.722.
I had vonage a few years ago....great if you have the bandwidth. However, on a slower DSL connection, you cant be on the phone and surfing at the same time.
Ditto, we use Cisco and have over 2500 phones acrcoss the US all coming back here for interoffice and long distance. Local calls go out the router at the site. I think the thing that makes it work so well in the corporate enviroment is that it is managed on internal networks and most large businesses use reliable companies for thier connections to the outside. Yea how do those customers get their numbers back to go somewhere else?
You can if your router has QoS (Quality of Service), then you can specify that the voice packets have priority over the data packets and the voice quality never gets bad. My router has this and when I use my VPN Hard phone at home (establishes a VPN tunnel back to my office phone system) I have no issues.
I never got into the fancy stuff in setting it up...*shrug* Plus t3h cell f0n3 was t3h more pr4ct!cal....
Plus costs money. You can now get dual mode cell phones that also have WiFi in them. At home calls are free via VoIP. yes I'm a geek.