Bad call

Inluminent points to Vonage, a company that provides phone service over your existing broadband Internet connection. That’s an interesting idea, but I have to wonder about the quality of the service. One of the advantages of plain old telephone service (POTS) is the reliability. Very rarely do you pick up the phone and not get dialtone. Even in storms that cause power outages affecting thousands of people, the phones still work. John notes that his cable Internet service has only been down for 20 minutes in three months, but that may not be true. Most people don’t use the Internet at the same intervals as their phone. If your Internet connection is down while you are away from the computer, you probably wouldn’t notice since the majority of your Internet communications are asynchronous. Someone can send you email while your computer is turned off or your connection is down and you’ll still get it eventually. If someone calls you on the phone and your connection is down, suddenly you’ll take notice.

There’s another reason why POTS reliability is important — emergencies. If you have a life-threatening emergency and need to call for help, are you willing to bet that yoru broadband connection will be up?

I also have to wonder about a company that doesn’t want you to use their Web site if you don’t use the right browser. The site uses JavaScript that looks for browsers other than Netscape 4.79 or newer and Internet Explorer 4.0 or newer and redirects users to a page that instructs them to download the latest Netscape or IE versions. When I turned off Javascript I was able to access the site without any problem, so there’s apparently no reason to deny other browsers the use of the site.

Would Vonage keep from using any phone I wanted in order to get calls? Or would I need to use new phones that they’ve approved?