I have heard good and bad from clients as far as the quality of the VOIP services in general.  Worth checking into as long as the quality of sound is good...

I have heard good and bad things as well. The quality of VOIP depends on a few things. One of the major things is your connection to the internet. If you have a broadband connection your good to go. However, if your constantly download music and videos, or running several servers etc on a network thats not built for them...you will have poor quality VOIP. I've been using VOIP with Vonage for several months and think it's one of my best investments so far. I can forward calls to my cell phone with the click of a button, make it ring different numbers all at the same time. I even get my voice mail messages in my inbox! Not to mention I can check my messages anywhere in the world for nothing. 

Their soft phone is really cheap as well. It lets you take your Vonage service anywhere you go. All you have to do is plug the soft phone into your laptop or any other computer that has USB and internet.

You can get toll free numbers real cheap, and everything. As you can see I'm a big fan. My first month was free, so I got to try it out and see how I liked it before I had to pay!

Thanks for the comment. 

I use Vonage.

For me, it has been fantastic. I am on sabbatical in the united kingdom right now. However, people can still dial my local california number, and my phone rings here in London. Despite the distance from here to the vonage servers, I get great quality.

I think the first mistake most vonage users is to crank the quality way up. Lets make something clear, if you set vonage to its LOWEST settings, you are going to get phone quality connections.... um.... do you need better than phone quality connections over your phone? At first, I had it all maxed out as long as nothing else was going on with my local network. Once I turned it down I got great performance, even when I was downloading other things at the time.

A whole lot of the bad things to say about vonage are old stories. I was a pretty early adopter and definitely had some issues with them. However, since about 3 years ago, I have had absolutely no complaints.

In fact, I am going to be opening my own office at the end of 2007 and I plan to have my phone service with vonage. I did the math and it was cheaper to just get a really fat broadband connection to the office and use vonage than to get a normal connection and get a business line from the telephone company.

There is one wrinkle in all this. My wife works for Cisco and we have one of their VOIP phones on the home network as well. I may entertain the idea of having a full blown cisco VOIP business solution.  But that is a whole other topic. 

Hey Robert, thanks for the reply. Great feedback!

I use Lingo.  I like getting my voice mail messages by email.  I use it because my husband used to work for Primus, not because it is better than any other VoIP service.  Lingo.com is the web address... I like it for faxing.

hey Eva, thanks for the comment.Vonage also comes with a free fax line! I did take a look at Lingo. I was impressed how it had some smaller and cheaper residential packages.

we use vonage at home and packet 8 at the office.  VOIP telephony is where its at if you want feature packed service at an affordable price.