VOIP Technologies
I may be one of the last hold-outs on this technology. I'm still not all that impressed with it, to be completely honest. Oh, I love that you can take your phone with you and plug it back in anywhere, of course, but the quality just isn't up there for me. We first tried VOIP as our personal phone line about a year and a half ago and it was a nightmare. It was in Beta for Time Warner and we agreed to be guinea pigs. I am not kidding when I say that there was a week where we had no less than 20 people going through our home trying to get this thing to work for longer than an hour. When it did start working, we had some pretty bad problems with garbled messages and skipping and other "data packet" errors. We had then take it out after a month.
We recently had a client want us to answer their phones (temporarily while they are moving). We have had the same type of problems. This is Vonage this time - and we use a business internet account so we have a higher bandwidth than residential. I will say that installation was much easier, but we still have the same "packet error" type of problems. We have noticed that it seems to be worse if we are uploading a file or doing something that uses a lot of bandwidth. We specialize in bookkeeping and sending/receiving large files is just par for the course.
An article caught my eye because apparently Microsoft's Summit seems to be having similar problems with a similar technology. I'm just not sure if this has been refined enough to make a viable option for business owners. After thinking about it, the only way this would work for us is if we had a separate internet line coming in JUST for this technology. For that price, we may as well have the landline.
The article on the Summit, referenced above, can be found HERE.
We recently had a client want us to answer their phones (temporarily while they are moving). We have had the same type of problems. This is Vonage this time - and we use a business internet account so we have a higher bandwidth than residential. I will say that installation was much easier, but we still have the same "packet error" type of problems. We have noticed that it seems to be worse if we are uploading a file or doing something that uses a lot of bandwidth. We specialize in bookkeeping and sending/receiving large files is just par for the course.
An article caught my eye because apparently Microsoft's Summit seems to be having similar problems with a similar technology. I'm just not sure if this has been refined enough to make a viable option for business owners. After thinking about it, the only way this would work for us is if we had a separate internet line coming in JUST for this technology. For that price, we may as well have the landline.
The article on the Summit, referenced above, can be found HERE.
posted by Candy at 8:59 PM
2 Comments:
I just got my VOIP account about a week ago and everything works GREAT. I am using sunrocket. I read reviews by happy users over cnet and a couple other sites and decided to give it a try. It also came with 2 free phones and there was no equipment to buy! I also have a cable connection through time warner. So far, the connections have been on par with a landline and it seems like this was an excellent choice. I'll let you know if things change.
Things tend to go pretty smooth with my VoIP phone as well. Until there is a message waiting....or we want to transfer files. Either of these happen while I'm trying to talk on the phone, I might as well hang up.
In defense of the phone, it has gotten better in the last couple of weeks. Luckily, I won't be using the VoIP phone much longer as it is part of a contract I am working on.
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