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I have been looking at making the switch to a VoIP provider for sometime now. My problem has been the fact that none of them offer you the ability to keep your current local number. At least in my area you can’t. Until now!!!! Lingo does just that and has some pretty good features and services.
If it is as good as it says, and I can in fact keep my local number, I will switch. My question to all of you is this. Make a comment to this post. Tell us what VoIP you are using. And if any of you are using the provider lingo, please tell us about it.
I really think VoIP is the answer for solos and us home office lawyers looking to save on overhead. But, at the same time providing quality service to our clients. Whatever phone service we use, it has to be reliable.
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I am using Vonage for home and business. The business vonage number is automatically forwarded to an office land line. I wouldn’t recommend using Vonage for business exclusively, because the quality of the calls can be bad, especially when calling international.
Grant – I’d stay away from VoIP as much as possible. My experience with them is that the quality of the calls is pretty bad (especially when you’re using the Internet for other things, including syncing Mail, or the like). In addition, I’ve found in my research that even with companies that offer number portability, the number transfers ownership to the VoIP company and then it’s very difficult to get it back. Google it yourself, but I think you’ll find that there are a fair number of complaints about this from all companies. Now, for most laypeople, it’s not a big deal – just get a new number, but I daresay that keeping the same phone number for the length of the career may be one of the most important assets we have in this industry. I’m all for saving money (and managing 3 attorneys and a boatload of overhead makes me ever aware of the need), but I wouldn’t do it in this situation. Pay the freight – just my $.02.
I just passed my third anniversay using Vonage. Early in the experience, the service was not as reliable as standard phone service. But after the first year, the price dropped and the service improved. I practice Michigan appellate family law from my home in Florida. Vonage lets me have a Michigan “virtual number” for $5 per month that allows my clients and referring trial attorneys reach me without a long distance charge. When I am out and about, I go to the Vonage Web site and forward calls to my Treo 650. I also like the email voice mail notification with a .wav file attached to the email. I can listen to messages at home or on my Treo.
I’ve found call quality to be very high. In fact, there is so little background noise that callers sometimes ask if I am still on the line.
The only downside is that Vonage, like my Internet connection (Road Runner Business Class), goes out when the power is out. Living in a hurricane zone, that can mean a couple of days if a storm hits nearby. When the network is down, I set calls to automatically forward to my Treo.
My satisfaction may be based on the speed of my Internet connnection. Business Class service is faster than standard cable. My son plays Xbox Live and even in mid-game we have no problem with phone calls. It may also be that I use a Linksys WRT54G with QoS enabled to give priority to the port where the Vonage converter box (Motorola) is connected. Although Vonage prefers that you connect their converter ahead of your router, I wanted to be able to use PalmVNC to connect to and remotely control my PC from my Treo. I never could figure out how to do port forwarding with the Vonage adapter, but it is a breeze with the Linksys router, so I moved the Vonage adapter behind the router. That works fine so long as QoS on the router is enabled to give priority to the Vonage adapter.
Overall, I am very pleased with the low cost and high quality service provided by Vonage. I have only one line because I use an Efax account (also with a Michigan number) for sending and receiving faxes.
I have been using Vonage business line for the past few months. No major complaints about call quality.
Lots of great features and very easy to customize. But, there is no way to set up multiple voicemail boxes. This is unfortunate because I have a partner. You can use an answering machine with multiple boxes instead, but all of the great Voip voicemail features (including. .wav messages to email) are lost. Lingo might have the same weakness.
Here in Seattle, where bad storms play havoc with our mostly above ground electrical system, VOIP is risky.
I use a combination of Bellsouth and Voip for my one lawyer office. I have incoming Bellsouth PSTN lines and several voip lines. My voip lines are through vitelity.net which has very good service. As I live in on a barrier island in East Central Florida, redundancy for hurricane outages is very important. My calls are received if the bellsouth lines are out or if the internet is out. If both are out and the cell service is down I am out of luck! All of this is tied together with a pbx based on the open source software Asterisk. The PBX program I use is called Trixbox (www.trixbox.org). http://www.nerdvittles.com is a great website run by a retired lawyer which explains all the great things trixbox can do and he provides lots of applications to work with it. Voip and trixbox allow me to have my relief receptionist work in Georgia and me to work at my home or in my office or off of my laptop and be part of the office phone network without using cell phones. All voicemail is converted to email and my cell phone is text messaged that I have new messages.
I have used lingo for the last 3 years or so. I like it. I use it for home. Initially had connectivity problems but it was carrier. ? call 301-645-5755