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VOIP has come a long way and most people don't know it, but traditional telephone companies are using VOIP for traditional calls. With the advancements in technology, it is going to be the same thing so as long as you choose the right company with quality service, it should not be a problem.

VOIP is great for small business. I use a company called Packet 8 and I have two phone lines, a dedicated 800 number and a fax line. I haven't had any problems and I save $97.00 a month based on what I was paying Verizon.

I used a voice over IP for some time on a larger scale we had 1 T-1 and then a back up T-1 for a fixed cost of 1100.00 a month we used a company called XO Communications we very seldom had any issues with down time. We saved alot of money over traditional phone services.

Let's talk about reliability: There are very few systems that are "reliable" any more. Why? Since the break-up of AT&T, the entire industry has been on the track of "separating the network elements." A company will focus its efforts on one part of the network, be it the long haul fiber optic cable, the metro fiber rings, the connection from the street to the bldg, the "in-building" riser cable, and finally, the cable distribution plan within your own space. And of course, add on your communication devices to finish everything. In other words, the POTS of yester-year (Plain Old Telephone System) which had five 9s reliability (99.999% up time) is a distant memory. At 99.999%, you did not have service for an average of say, a few minutes per year. Nowadays, a system (remember- all in- and virtually no "provider" controls all the elements) rarely achieves four 9s (99.99%) let alone three 9s (99.9% up time). While these figures still sound good, the drop off is precipitous. At three 9s, the downtime is about 7 days/year. And don't think that it is 7 days in a row or 3 days here and 4 days there. It could be 7 days spread out over minutes or even seconds.

To answer your question: Yes, VoIP is excellent and works well. Part II: Try to make sure the VoIP controls (owns) as many of the network elements as the any other provider. Let's face it> we are now conditioned to losing a connection. Hey, if you don't carry several portable communication devices, you are asking for trouble....

More avail > just contact me...

Stick2basics,

Nice chart,but very overpriced service. Why wouldn't you go with a cable company that offers the triple play package or Vonage the leading VOIP provider? They both will have half the costs.

Is that a typo "Residential service is only $199 per month."?

I use Voip and couldn't be happier. I pay 1.95/month per DID (number) and then 3.95 per toll free DID. I pay less than 1 cent a minute for domestic and about 1.8 cents a minute for toll free anywhere in the US.

DID's in Voip act like PRI's so you can have multiple channels incoming/outgoing and just pay for the minutes used. I purchased some grandstream voip phones, use voip software and have recently started to purchase cisco voip (sip) phones.

I use Asterisk hosted on my co-located server and it allows me to work from where ever i have internet. Pretty neat since i can setup conf calls, get my voicemails in email and get everything i need. I even run my faxes through asterisk/voip. Of course i have multiple providers setup and i have QoS enabled on my router and i use a v-lan to segregate the traffic as much as possible and made sure not to cheat myself on bandwidth. With the telco savings alone it was a no-brainer to upgrade our internet service at home and the office.

vonage leases their network elements- they have little control over QOS, and cannot- despite whatever they say, guarantee much better than 99.9, which is not very reliable. The costs also sound high. If you are thinking of this as an investment into your future or as an upgrading of your system, why bother? No soft phone? Come on.... Keep looking....