For the past year my wife has been threatening me with throwing my Vonage phone out the window. I’ve been a happy customer, mostly because of the 29 dollar a month price tag. However I have to say that things have been dropping like crazy. My wife couldn’t be on the phone for more than a minute before getting bumped.
I can tolerate that kinda service for that kinda price, buy my wife on the other hand…well she would rather pay 100 bucks a month by going with a regular land line through Nextiva which is the Business VoIP – Call Anywhere in the World.
I had to figure out what the heck was going on. I had to figure out what changed in the past year. Well, for starters I did upgrade from regular Comcast Cable Internet to Verizon FIOS. Let me tell you, I HATE Verizon with a passion, but the FIOS service has been incredible fast and reliable.
I thought maybe perhaps I had a shotty connection? I found a great website that lets you test you Internet reliability for VOIP connections:
http://www.vonage-forum.com/voip-speed-test.html
(This site requires registering with the forum, but it is worth it to see how good/bad your connection is).
I ran the test and found absolutely nothing wrong with my Internet connection…FIOS has delivered on its promises.
I decided to see if maybe this has something to do with my cordless phone. The next step was a simple one…plug in a regular phone directly into the VOIP Vonage phone adapter. I spent a few hours talking to everyone I could think of on the regular “plug-in” phone with no disconnections at all. Looks like I was getting somewhere.
The next thing I did was look at my cordless phone. Hmm…funny enough, this thing was running at the same frequency as the free wireless router that Verizon provided for free with FIOS. My cordless phone is running at 2.4 GHz and the 802.11G wireless router (which so happens to be a DI-624) was running at the same. So pretty much these two devices didn’t like each other.
I figured the only solution for this was to upgrade my cordless phone to a higher frequency, 5.8ghz. I didn’t want to go back to 802.11b or 900mhz…just didn’t make sense. I found a nice deal over at Walmart for a 5.8 GHz cordless phone which actually states on its packaging: “Does not interfere with most other electronic equipment.”
Gee, thanks for helping me solve my year long mystery, oh great Walmart.
Suggested Cordless Phones for Use With Vonage:
- EnGenius Cordless Phone
- GE 5.8 GHz Corded Phone with 2 Cordless Handsets
- Panasonic 5.8 GHz 3-Handset Digital Phone/ Answering System with Handset Speakerphone & Caller ID