It will be worth it Cleo. If you use a fax machine, get that option as well. It is only an extra $5/month and there really is nothing like a dedicated fax line.

Fax machine???
That is like so 20th century…

Vonage modem should be here on Wednesday and they gave me a temp number to use with it until my business number is moved to it. I've already logged into my Vonage account and setup the features that I wanted. No voice mail and rings to my cell at the same time as my home.

The biggest hassle is going to be changing my home wiring to accommodate the new lines and equipment. ADSL modem is going to have to be wired into the new line that Bellsouth is putting in and then all my house wiring is going to have to be hooked into the Vonage modem including my alarm system. Should be easy enough to do since Bellsouth's box is just on the other side of my office wall. Guess I should go by Home Depot and buy a long carbide masonry drill bit today since the wall is cement block. I hate doing wiring.

Good luck. I've been trying for 10 weeks to get my phone line moved. While I do think Bellsouth is dicking around a bit every time I call Vonage I get a different excuse so I think they're a bit clueless as well.

I'll give them until the end of the month .

Maybe your alarm can go out over both your Vonage modem and your new BellSouth line? Would make your house better protected when cable is out. Unless they're both out at the same time.

I'm actually going to put the Vonage on my ADSL line once it is working again but really my alarm could go on either the Vonage line or the line that the ADSL is going on.

Up here, you can get your DSL "unbundled" from your phone line. They assign a new number to "just your DSL" and the phone part stops working (but the DSL stays live). There is no real requirement that there is a working phone number for DSL to work, just a solid physical connection to the C/O.

However, phone companies will try to stiff you by trying to tell you that it isn't possible.

Good luck Cleo... I moved mine over to Vonage a couple of months ago without any major issues at all.

Alex

Hey now, I resemble that remark!!! :D

Don't pay attention to Sir Moby. He is stalking me for my collection of Cowboys clothing.

I got Vonage going, and it wasn't a problem. I haven't tried to do the thing about making it live on all the phone lines yet, however.

Vonage can't move my phone number until I have a confirmation number from Earthlink but Earthlink can't give me a confirmation number until Bellsouth has put in the new phone line. |banghead|

Vonage modem arrived today. I plugged it in to the power and my ethernet hub, and a phone into it and the phone worked.

Then I went outside and disconnected from the company and plugged the Vonage modem into my house's phone jack and all my house phones worked.

That was the easy part…
I had this big rat's nest of wires outside that is my house's phone wires that I needed to go through and figure out which ones went to my bedroom, living room, office, alarm system, and the ADSL modem. I was going to leave the alarm on the Vonage system since that seemed easiest but somehow in separating the ADSL modem wire from the rest of the house's wires nothing ended up working so I had to trace each wire by plugging a cordless phone into it and then testing which wires outside made that line work. Also the alarm system was wired in such a way that first my phone passed through it and then into my house so that it could hang up the line if it was busy and it needed to make a call.

Got everything hooked back up and working. Now there is just two sets of wires going to the phone company's box, one for the alarm and one for the ADSL modem.

Tomorrow Bellsouth is putting in a new line so that I can have Earthlink move the ADSL to it and then I can start the transfer of my phone number to Vonage.

In the meantime I forwarded my home number into the Vonage temp number that they gave me and everything seems to be working correctly.

Since I have Vonage set to ring my house and cell phone at the same time it's really nice the way if I'm on the phone both my call waiting and cell phone rings at the same time and then I can either answer it form my home phone or cell phone or just let my cell's voice mail get it.

You know another nice feature??? You can have a voice mail file emailed to you. So, all you have to do is click on the file and listen. And, that way, you never lose any voice mail messages.

I turned off Vonage's voice mail since I have it set to ring my cell phone and its voice mail picks up my messages. I'm not sure but I think I can have my cell's voice mail emailed to me too. This is how I had it setup before with the phone company. I like just having one voice mail.

Other then my house's phone wiring is no longer a big mess, well at least not as bad as it was, and my fingernails look like I do manual labor for a living about the only thing I've noticed different is everyone says I sound louder on the phone and people calling me seem louder too.

Tomorrow begines the moving ADSL line and then my phone number adventure. :D

Yep, the only difference I noticed was I had to turn down the volume on my cordless handset. And of course when the cable goes out (which is rare)...the phone goes out too. No big deal since there are 2 cells in the house :)

How about trying Earthlink's True voice? It functions the same with vonage but I think it's cheaper :)

Looks like it is exactly the same.
https://store.earthlink.net/cgi-bin/...uvvoip&deal=cj

LOL... i thought erathlink's true voice is a dollar cheaper compared to vonage |jester|

Wow this is amazingly complicated to coordinate with all the service providers.

Bellsouth showed up this morning to put in the line that will carry my backup ADSL. Phone guy wanted to just disconnect the existing line and use it for the new line. I had to tell him to leave the old line alone and to put in the new line as a second line. Seemed easy enough since I have a six line box outside my house and was only using one line. He seemed very surprised that I would take care of moving the two wires to the new line and that I had cleaned up all the wires in the box outside my home yesterday. Probably didn't help that he had woken me up and I was in a nightgown with big bed hair just looking all wrong.

Called Earthlink to have my ADSL service moved to the new number. Should have never mentioned Vonage to them because it confused them and they started going on about how they can't move DSL to a Vonage line. Finally explained that the new line was from Bellsouth and it was the old line that was getting moved to Vonage. Earthlink said it would take about a week to move the DSL. It was like pulling teeth to get Earthlink's Order ID number from them that Vonage wanted.

Just sent an email to Vonage with Earthlink's ID number. Can't wait to see what the next issue will be in moving my phone number to Vonage…

One thing about Vonage...call their tech support if you want to hear some pure outsourced Indian workers. Last phone call to vonage lasted something like 40 minutes as the operator was spelling out my username using the military alphabet...nothing spells fun like hearing A as in Alpha a bunch of times as they fumbled the spelling, lol.

I set up some kind of deal within Vonage where if the cable goes out the call goes to my cell phone. It's not in the normal call forwarding section.

Yep, I have mine set up the same way |thumb

I've called them 4 times trying to get my phone # transferred and while I'm not happy about making 4 phone calls at least the people spoke English. In fact they all had regional US accents so I don't think I spoke with anyone over seas.

I've called twice and both time got people with heavy Indian accents. Perhaps its the time that I call...it's not easy keeping dracula hours, lol.

SirMoby, they take them to school and teach the indian people how to have nice america accepts even... give them american names (Sam instead Sabinder, example), and make them work very, very hard on sounding american. What usually gets me is the very slight time delay that makes conversation difficult.

Nothing against overseas call centers, but I know when I get one, I will not be talking to anyone who can actually make a decision or fix my problem, just someone to take notes and pass it on to someone else who will ignore my needs later.

Alex

Yep, I've had one Indian guy try to pull off a southern accent rather unsuccessfully, lol.

I saw that the PPoE light went out on the Earthlink modem so I went outside and moved the wires to the new DSL line and it worked. I also see that my Bellsouth business number has been moved to Vonage so I'm done and everything went well. :)

I also moved the Vonage modem to the Earthlink DSL since I never use that unless my cable modem goes out.

I really do love this Vonage service. :)

so who's vonage affiliate code did you end up using? who gets the two free months?!?

:)

I afraid that like my neighbor who just got his Vonage I didn't use anyone's code but you would have thought that someone would have given me theirs when I first started saying I was getting Vonage. I was a bit annoyed with my neighbor who asked me to help him setup his Vonage after not bothering to mention me as his referral.

Just got off the phone with FUCKING Earthlink. Over one hour on the phone to get an early disconnection fee of $149.95 removed. Three different Indian phone support people and lots of time on hold listing to the repeating message on how great their service is. Last one that finally did give my a credit minus the $50 change of service fee kept on telling me he doesn't hear very well so I told him that probably phone support was not a good employment choice. None of them seemed to understand English very well or at least not my northeast accent.

And I see that Bellsouth has not actually released my phone number to Vonage so hopefully this is just a delay and not another issue that I'll have to spend hours on hold resolving.

While I was on hold I did find at least on DSL provider that provides DSL without having to have a phone line from Bellsouth so if Bellsouth and/or Earthlink pisses me off it is nice to know that I can get backup DSL service for about the same price as I'm paying for a phone line from Bellsouth to carry the DSL and Earthlink DSL service.

I am loving the Vonage service and I'm very happy with it so far. :)

Cleo, when I switched mine up here it took nearly 10 days for the actual transfer to go through. The phone companies will keep you to the very last legal second to bill you as much as they can.

Alex

Yesterday I noticed that callers were breaking up. They said that I sounded fine but they sounded very bad at my end. A bit like what a cell phone does but not breaking up in the same way. Tried rebooting the Vonage hardware, tried rebooting the Earthlink hardware but noting worked. Finally moved Vonage back to Comcast and all has been fine since. Seems Vonage does not play well with Earthlink.

There is a court case pending in DC regarding Verizon and the performance of Vonage over their DSL lines. Since there is a TOS (Type of Service) header in the packets, and VOIP requires much better networking -- low latency, bunch of tiny little packets, Verizon has allegedly used these header bits to reduce the quality of service to prevent VOIP from working over their DSL lines. They have asked the Public Utilities Commission for incentives to upgrade the areas that are most affected and say that it is that the network they have built is overused -- but web performance is still blazing fast over their network and we should be able to offer Cable over DSL Mr. Commissioner.

I use Vonage over my BellSouth DSL and it seems fine to me -- although, I can use the net in certain ways to make it break up.

Yeah that is what I was thinking since Earthlink is plenty fast if I use it for surfing so it is strange that Vonage would not work well on it since nothing else is normally using Earthlink.

Took a long time but today my number was finally transferred to Vonage as of today. The email says that when I go home I need to reboot the modem but that is it.

I have to say that I am very happy with Vonage. I should have switched a long time ago.

|headbang|

It took us about 3 months to get the number switched but now we're there and so far so good.

My big holdup besides first having to get the adsl off of that line was bellsouth insisted on my account info being exactly the same as on my bill instead of being on correct human readable form. Little things like having T.T.Z. instead of Ttz as it is on my bill. I finally just ended up scanning my phone bill and sending it to Vonage.

As much hassle as it was to keep a backup adsl line in case my cable modem went down I probably would have instead went with a Verizon or Sprint card for my laptop for backup internet, but all that has nothing to do with Vonage. It also would have been nice to be completely bellsouth free.

Only prob for me, which is probably my isp up here in the sticks,
is I can't talk and review at the same time.
Not a big deal to stop working when the phone rings.. (because it's my kids normally)
Saving about 45.00 a month though :)