Digital Trends

Vonage Broadband Telephone Service

January 19th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

There are several ways to hook up the VT1005. If you only have one computer, the VT1005 acts as a DHCP server that assigns an IP address to your computer. If you have several computers on a network chances are that you already have a router or switch, in which case you would connect the Voice Terminal to one of the open ports on your network.

The router functions of the VT1005 are not as robust as a regular SOHO networking router, but for a single computer it is more than adequate.

We tested the effectiveness of the router functions by making phone calls while performing tasks online on a computer connected directly to the VT1005 Voice Terminal. In our tests, we downloaded large files and played multiplayer games online while talking on the phone. Our download speed was consistently similar in three such tests.

We made many phone calls while playing online multiplayer games, listening to streaming audio and downloading files and voice quality was consistently excellent.

When we really hammered our cable connection with a lot of downloads — such as downloading binaries from newsgroups while simultaneously downloading a 56MB game patch file, there was a noticeable hit on the quality of our voice communications. The speech from the person we were talking to got a bit choppy at times. The person on the other end however, said our speech sounded just fine and did not change. This is presumably because what we were hearing from the person we were talking to was being downloaded, while what he was listening to was being uploaded by us — and we were not using any other upload.

Curiously, when uploading two files at once to an FTP site, the person we were talking to said there was no change at all in voice quality.

We used over 500 minutes in a month of testing and had no problems with the service at all. Calls were clear, features worked as intended and basically, it worked just like a regular phone service. You may think there would be a lag associated with placing calls over the Internet, but there is none whatsoever. If you didn't already know you were talking on VoIP, you would just assume it was a regular POTS line.