Vonage (http://www.vonage.com) is the first Voice Over IP (VOIP) company for consumers and small businesses that really gets it right! Most impressive is that Vonage presupposes that you have a broadband connection, provides hardware to allow you to use regular phone equipment. Best of all, Vonage gives you a real phone number, and on incoming calls, a phone actually does ring. It seems completely feasible that Vonage would allow one not to even have a conventional phone but rather just a "Vonage Phone". Vonage points the way to the future of the telecommunications system; for example, when conversing between two Vonage customers, there is no limit to the conversation because the conversation remains on the Internet and doesn't transit the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) where it must be tarriffed, reciprocated, terminated, etc. all of which have costs associated with them. A Vonage customer calling another Vonage customer completely avoids that nonsense. I'm told that the Vonage service also works great with Cisco VOIP phones (Vonage uses a Cisco infrastructure), but Vonage isn't currently offering the option to use Cisco VOIP phones.
Thanks for Todd Boyle for triggering the thought to mention Vonage.
Steve Stroh
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Stroh. This article originally appeared on my original Broadband Wireless Internet Access Weblog hosted on Radio Userland.
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