VoIP: First Impressions

I just got an iPod, and it’s not just nice. It’s surprisingly nice. For it to surprise me, it must be satisfying expectations I didn’t know I had. No focus group is going to discover those. Only a great designer can.

I’ve been playing with some of the features and the question keeps coming to me: why I didn’t get this sooner?! Now I have to admit, the initial install was not completely painless, but that’s because I already have a my own home network and I tried to be a little clever in how I integrated the Linksys VoIP router into my system. If I had a simplier setup and had just followed the directions, I imagine it would have been snag free.

Call quality seems perfect and you just can’t beat the feature set. Unlimited nationwide long distance, free call waiting, caller ID, voicemail, and call forwarding. I was particularly impressed with the call forwarding. You can set up the service to dial first to your VoIP phone and then after a specified number of seconds or minutes, it will forward to another number (like you cell phone). Or you can have it simultaneously forward to the second number so that it rings on both my cell phone and the VoIP phone.

Okay, maybe I just got a new toy and I’m really excited. And maybe in a week or two I’ll discover all the warts and become jaded. But if first impressions count for much, Vonage has pulled off an excellent one.

Oh, since my local phone service is horrid, I can’t keep my local phone number, so I’ve got a new number. Call me on my cell phone or email me if you want the new number.