One of the potential negatives is that VOIP providers do not (yet) have to
provide a 911 link. On a land line, it's pretty obvious where it's coming
from, but on the internet???

I am not advocating it for regular use, but it certainly has cut down the
cost of conversing with my Mom, or my wife and her sisters.

It seemed to be full-duplex when I spoke to my mother last night - no
cutting each other off.

--

Ray Barkalow - First Rays Orchids - www.firstrays.com
Plants, Supplies, Artwork, Books and Lots of Free Info!


"Dave Fouchey" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 17:50:03 -0400, "Ray"
wrote:

With high-speed internet access, it's quite good. My brother-in-law, with
whom I tested the dial-up connection, said it wasn't bad at all.

Quality of the microphone does make a difference. I have a $15 Labtec.

There are over 1.8 million people online as I type this, and I've seen it
a
million more and there have never been issues.

What's neat is that for $35 per year you can get a phone number for your
connection so land lines can call you, and for that again, an answering
service that works even when you're offline! Between my First Rays phone,
home phone, office phone and cell phone, all of which have both of those,
I
don't see the need, but it's there if you need it.
As we speak I have replaced my land line Telephone Service with VOIP
I-Phone service and have had no reduction in quality. And for a flat
rate of $39 a month I can call anywhere in the US or Canada as often
and as long as I wish.

VOIP has advanced rapidly in quality and ubiquitous coverage. We use
it at work for controlling radios along the train tracks and for some
of our inter city telephone networking. That said there is a trade off
when using it over low speed data lines under 64KB such as dial up but
even there the newer compression algorithms have improved the
situation greatly.

Dave