AOL Jumps Into VoIP Service
Posted by Aoife McEvoy | Tuesday, March 08, 2005 2:27 PM PT
Big news from one of the big dogs: AOL is yet another company to jump on the Voice-over-IP bandwagon (albeit a little late in the game). AOL?s setup will mimic the services from companies like
Vonage,
VoicePulse,
Lingo, and
BroadVoice, where you connect an adapter to your broadband router and telephone. You don?t even need to turn on your PC to reach out and call someone.
I?ve tested a slew of these hardware-based VoIP services (
see my Lingo review, for example), and the call quality and overall experience is great--for the most part.
I am eager to try out the new
AOL Internet Phone Service to find out whether its call quality matches that of competing services. And I like AOL?s ?dashboard? idea, that is, its plan to integrate the VoIP service with e-mail and IM. Leveraging the capabilities of the Internet like this is a smart move--something that other Internet phone services lack, I believe. But will the dashboard work as advertised? I?ll be standing by, ready to put it through its paces, when the time comes. (Check out my
Net Phone Zone columns for more VoIP news.)
Okay, so the list of big boys fighting for a piece of the VoIP pie keeps getting longer. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, SBC Yahoo, and now AOL.
Who?s next?
And hey, if you use VoIP, let us know which service and how you like it.
I have been with Vonage for 8 months now.I know their call center is "full", so I call early in the morning. Better yet their Vonage Forum has had some great advice. My phone bill in Ohio was $84.00, and now it's 16.95!
The two troublesome "glitches" I have had have had nothing to do with Vonage, but the instead hardware the hardware wired to the system. One issue was with the landline teleco not disconnecting their line from my home, Vonage helped me diagnose the problem and instruct me on how to disconnect the line. The second problem had to do with the 900ghz phone set in one room of my home.( I'm a science teacher so used the Scientific Method to trace the diagnose the problem.)It turned out to be the single phone set that would disconnect the entire phone link to Vonage for 10 minutes!I connected another 900ghz phone to the same line and haven't had a disconnect since.
I have signed up with Packet 8. There $19.95 a month for unlimited call's can't be beat. And they offer two months free if you bought your adapter from Tigerdirect.com. I am very happy with the service. I cut my phone bill more than half. The service and quality of the service is by far well worth the savings. I have been using this service for about 2 months now. Have not had any problems with it. So I would recommend the VOIP to anyone who is trying to save some money off their phone bill.
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