Vonage and VoIP: Can You Really Replace Your Phone Line With Internet?

The pitch sounds almost too good: take your broadband internet connection, plug in a small adapter box, and make unlimited phone calls — local and long distance — for a flat $24.99 per month. No per-minute charges. No surprise fees. Just internet-powered telephone service.

That's what Vonage is selling, and after three months of testing it as our daily office phone, we have a verdict: it mostly works, it saves real money, and it's not quite ready to be your only phone line. Yet.

What Vonage Is

Vonage is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. Instead of routing your phone calls over the traditional telephone network, Vonage converts your voice into data packets and sends them over the internet — the same internet connection you use for email and web browsing.

The setup is straightforward. Vonage ships you a small device called an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) — a Cisco/Linksys box about the size of a paperback book. You connect it between your broadband modem (or router) and a regular telephone handset. Pick up the phone, and you get a dial tone. Dial a number, and it rings — just like a normal phone call, except the audio is traveling as IP packets across the internet instead of as analog signals across the phone network.

You get a real phone number — we were assigned a number with a 646 area code (New York). People can call you from any phone, landline or cell, and it rings on your VoIP handset. Outbound calls show your Vonage number on caller ID.

The Plan

Vonage offers two primary plans:

• Unlimited Plan: $24.99/month — unlimited local and long-distance calling to any phone in the U.S. and Canada
• Basic 500 Plan: $14.99/month — 500 minutes per month

Both plans include voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, and three-way calling — features that would cost extra from your local phone company. International calling is available at per-minute rates that are generally cheaper than the traditional carriers.

Compare this to a standard phone bill: basic phone service from Verizon runs about $25/month before taxes and fees. Add unlimited long distance from a carrier like AT&T or MCI, and you're paying $40-50/month or more. Vonage's $25/month for everything is a significant savings, especially for households that make a lot of long-distance calls.

There's one critical catch: you need broadband to use Vonage. This isn't a dial-up service. You need a DSL or cable internet connection running at a minimum of 90kbps upstream to handle voice traffic. Most broadband connections easily exceed this, but if your DSL line is running at marginal speeds, voice quality may suffer.

Call Quality: The Real Question

This is what everyone wants to know, and the honest answer is: it's complicated.

On a good connection, Vonage sounds nearly identical to a regular phone call. We made dozens of calls during off-peak hours — mornings and early afternoons — and recipients couldn't tell we were using VoIP. The audio was clear, latency was imperceptible, and the experience felt exactly like using a normal telephone.

During peak broadband usage hours, quality degrades noticeably. We experienced occasional audio artifacts — a slight echo, brief moments of choppy audio, and latency that was just noticeable enough to cause people to talk over each other. These issues weren't constant, but they occurred often enough to be annoying during evening calls when our cable connection was presumably more congested.

If someone in the house is downloading a large file while you're on a call, quality drops significantly. VoIP is sensitive to bandwidth competition. When our test computer started a large download during a call, the audio quality tanked within seconds. This is manageable if you have a router with QoS (Quality of Service) settings that can prioritize voice traffic, but most consumer routers in 2003 don't have this feature.

We experienced two complete call drops in three months. Both occurred during what appeared to be brief internet outages — the broadband connection hiccupped, and the call simply died. On a traditional phone line, this doesn't happen because the phone network is independent of the internet.

What Vonage Gets Right

Price. There's no way around it — $25/month for unlimited calling is a fantastic deal. If you spend more than that on phone service today (and most people do), Vonage saves money from day one.

Features. Voicemail delivered to your email as an audio attachment. Online call logs. The ability to choose your area code regardless of where you live (useful for people who've relocated but want to keep a familiar number). These are things the traditional phone companies charge extra for or don't offer at all.

Portability. You can take the Vonage box anywhere with a broadband connection and it works. Traveling for business? Plug it in at the hotel (assuming they have broadband and don't block VoIP traffic). Your phone number follows you.

Setup simplicity. We had the service running within 20 minutes of opening the box. If you can plug in an Ethernet cable, you can set up Vonage.

What Vonage Gets Wrong

Reliability. Your phone works when your internet works. If your broadband goes down — which happens more often than most people realize — your phone goes down too. Traditional phone service runs on dedicated copper with battery backup at the central office. It works during power outages. VoIP doesn't.

911 service. This is the big one. Traditional 911 calls automatically route to your local emergency dispatcher and transmit your address. Vonage's 911 implementation is limited — calls may route to a general dispatcher rather than your local one, and your address may not be transmitted automatically. Vonage is working on improving this, but right now, VoIP 911 service is not equivalent to traditional 911. This alone is reason enough to keep a basic landline as a backup.

Call quality consistency. As described above, quality varies with network conditions. For casual calls, this is fine. For a business line or a household where phone reliability is critical, it's a concern.

Fax machines. Vonage technically supports fax, but the compression algorithms used for voice don't play well with fax tones. We had about a 50% success rate sending faxes. If you rely on fax, keep your landline.

The Bottom Line

Vonage works well enough to be genuinely useful, and the price savings are real. For a second phone line, a dedicated long-distance line, or a tech-savvy household that's comfortable with occasional quirks, it's an easy recommendation.

As your only phone line? Not yet. The 911 limitations alone are a dealbreaker for families with children. And the reliability gap between VoIP and traditional phone service — while narrowing — is still significant.

Our recommendation: keep a basic landline for emergencies and 911, and use Vonage for all your day-to-day calling. You'll save money and get better features. Just don't cut the cord entirely. Not this year.

VoIP is the future of telephone service. Vonage just proves that the future needs a little more polish before it's ready for everyone.