[ale] Vonage?

[George Carless]

On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 10:26:58PM -0400, miguel wrote:
> hi james...
> 
> i am thinking of getting vonage also...so from what you are saying i
> cant have this setup:
> 
> vonage box <--->ipcop box <---->netgear router <--->dsl modem
> 
> i need a hub between the router and the modem...?

I recently signed up for vonage, and I've been pretty happy with it. 
(<shameless>Oh, and if anyone wants to sign up and to get a month free
for them and for me, let me know and we can do the 'referral' thing 
;)</shameless>).. but at any rate, the recommended setup is indeed to 
have the vonage stuff first in your chain, so that it can do its QoS 
stuff to ensure that you get good call quality.  The Vonage thingy 
actually seems to work as a simple NAT device w/ dhcp serving - uin my 
scenario what appeared to happen was that the Vonage thing served up an 
IP to my router via DHCP; my router then used that and dutifully handed 
out IPs to the other machines on my network; it did cause a moment of 
confusion since my d-link router was configured to notify dyndns of new 
IPs, which meant that my domain wound up with an internal IP assigned to 
it in dyndns, but that was easy enough to tweak.  The Vonage stuff can 
be configured to use an internal machine[|router|whatever] for a DMZ, 
which I suppose means that you can continue having your network 
basically set up as-is (everything from the vonage box apart from the 
voice data would get routed on to the next thing in your chain, as I 
understand it).

Also, you *can* put the vonage stuff later in your chain (behind your 
router or whatnot) but it involves some extra configuration and I guess 
you wouldn't get the QoS stuff; however, Vonage do explicitly mention it 
in their manual and, presumably, therefore support it.  But it's not 
something I've tried.

Anyhow, hope this helps - I'd say that the vonage line quality is at 
least up to that of a cellphone, and the various gizmos -- not to 
mention the price -- all make it a very worthwhile pursuit.  In fact I'm 
in the process of ditching my girlfriend's current phone line + dialup 
setup, on the basis that cable + vonage will actually cost her lest 
money and will give her high-speed internet access..

Cheers,
--George