Today we both gave Vonage a first go with the Wi-Fi phone that turned up last week. During the week I’d set the phone up, which despite it being pre-programmed to our Vonage account, took a good hour of fiddling with the router, so I guess the promised ability to make calls from any wi-fi network are a little optimistic, especially as the problems I had were not due to the access security I have on the box. The problems came from the fact that for obvious reasons I run a firewall on the router, and to work, the phone needs certain UDP ports opened. This adds another problem, which is that the handset then needs to remain on one IP address on the router – if it ever were to change I’d have to change the port forwarding.

Also, as Garry pointed out, unless you’re phoning another Vonage user it’s really not that cheap – certainly there are regular providers, who work with our existing number and wiring, who are cheaper for calls to Canada.

Anyway, after sorting out the handset, today both Beth and myself tried them out for calls, Beth for a relatively short call, and myself for about 30 minutes when I phoned my parents. Firstly, we both noticed the effects of the compression, with periods of total silence when the person on the other end wasn’t talking. Whilst you can often hear something similar with transatlantic calls, it’s not usually noticeable on inland calls – indeed talking to my parents I can usually hear things like their cats coming in and starting to purr on the other end. Whilst I guess it would be something we would get used to, and may well just be the effect of the Wi-Fi handset, it is still sounds a bit odd. The other feature I noticed, which is definitely a handset issue, was quite how warm the handset actually got. It wasn’t burning hot like some laptops get, but definitely warm.

It has to be said that one of the main attractions for getting it was the local Canadian number, so we’ll have to see how that goes down, and what use people make of it. Certainly if Vonage UK goes the way of their US operation in waiving their calls to other Vonage countries the whole service will become more attractive. However with the significant disadvantages of not working with our existing wiring, or working in a power cut, or working properly for 999 calls, if we’re not going to be getting a much better quality call for our monthly fee, it certainly doesn’t seem like an attractive proposition.