I've been thinking of switching to voice over IP instead of using my cell phone to avoid long distance charges. Anyone use this service? Is it reliable? How does it work?

I have several friends that have this service and they love it. Your best bet is to do some research into it before you make the jump. I think many VOIP phone services have their 911 service operate a bit differently than the standard. As long as you have a reliable high-speed connection it should be pretty good. Just remember though that if the power is out so is your phone.

George

No power=no phone is the big one for most people. we don't realize just how powered we are until you have it go out and have no cell phone or house phone (providing you don't have a car charger and plenty of battery power/gas). I've never much looked into it myself as I don't trust it.

We were going to get it, but in the last year we have lost our cable connection several times due to wind storms, and I decided it was too risky.

Voip is not that big an issue for us with power outages, we have only had one and it was an ice storm which doesnt happen that often here for us but Im sure it deoends where you live too. We do have cell phones as backups though.

I have used VoIP for over a year now with absolutely no problem. If you have decent bandwidh, you'd never notice the difference. It's true that no power means no service but we have not an outage in that time and we still have our cell phones anyway.

For us the no power=no phone was too big. The one thing that our family does a lot of is talk, and when the power goes down in the winter we curl up in bed and yak on the phone. Can't give that up.

Hmmm, I guess I hadn't thought about no power/no internet meaning no phone. Though we don't have frequent outages, and when we do, we still have our cell phones (and car chargers ). thanks!

I have being using Vonage for over 5 years now and hardly could tell of a problem. I even have their softphone application on my laptop for when I travel. The one issue was when I had a low bandwidth and my conversations would get real choppy especially when my son started an online game or a download. Doubled my bandwidth and now I couldn't care less when he's on.