Vonage Telephone

When: Introduced in 2001

Purpose: To provide telephone service via the Internet

Sold: Directly via Vonage at their website and through affiliates

Manufactured: USA

Price:  Setup fee of about $30, with monthly fee between $25 and $50, depending on type of account and calling plan.

How: Connect the Cisco unit to the Internet and attach a telephone to it. Use the telephone as you would any other phone.

Effect: The quality of the telephone connection is directly related to the speed and reliability of your Internet connection. We used this unit at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas, and had fabulous connectivity using the hotel high speed Internet. Internet access at other locations has been variable.

Other:  The features on this telephone are pretty much everything you can purchase from the regular telephone providers, voice mail included. The calling plans include some generous amounts of calling time and competetive rates to other countries as well.

Our voicemail has been reset a few  times without warning (returning to default announcement and losing our recorded greeting), and some of the more elaborate features, like forwarding are not always 100 percent in our experience. In particular, the feature to forward the phone but have it go to voice mail if no answer after some period of time did not work well. We have also seen cases where people tried to call and got either busy or no voice mail after ringing. It seems this technology is pretty good, but not bulletproof (yet).