More on VoIP and Vonage

My education in VoIP continues.

While trying to get some idea of what ENUM is all about from a back end perspective, I've been poking around on CircleID quite a bit. Parsing Hype From Hope: Will ENUM Spark Changes In Telecom? is a pretty darned good description of how ENUM works from the client side perspective. Convergence: ENUM is a Big Deal by John Patrick is the one you find most people linking to (and is also worth reading). Bret Fausett recently pointed out Letting DNS Loose by Paul Mockapetris (he played a large part in developing DNS). The article argues that DNS is available, scalable, extensible (via NAPTR records) and can be used now, so let's take advantage of it. I've been surprised that so little of the web services infrastructure has gone this route. Perhaps we'll see more of that sort of thing happening this year.

Jeff Pulver's blog (rss) is a very good place to check for VoIP related happenings. I should also point out the SIP Wiki since David Beckemeyer brought it up recently and the Wikipedia SIP page.

On the Vonage front, things are going well. I asked Sarah to kill off our second line yesterday, which says something. A Voice in the Calling Wilderness from the NY Times is a good introduction to Vonage from a couple weeks ago. The author had many of the same questions and concerns I had going in.

I've had a few interesting configuration issues (I somehow got calls to forward immediately by playing with the call forwarding and voice mail delays... a bit of fiddling restored the behavior I wanted). It does not seem possible right now to easily flip call forwarding on as I walk out the door, but I expect that'll improve. Our VTech dual line phone (20-2431) doesn't seem to pay much attention to Caller ID information from Vonage, but I'm not too concerned about that. When I asked a support rep about it he said that he'd heard of a problem. It's not that big a deal to me, YMMV.

I did encounter something odd. I was trying to call someone who had tried out Vonage and then decided to leave their service. From a local line or a cell phone, the call worked. Calling via the Vonage service resulted in a fast busy tone. A query to support straightened things out quickly, but I do have some concerns about their deprovisioning process.