Our VoIP adapter from Vonage arrived today, and I placed my first VoIP call...which I answered myself on our Qwest line. Next, I talked to my wife with her on the Vonage phone and me on the Qwest cordless. Then I called my mom to invite her to dinner (and got her voice mail). So far, so good. Sound quality doesn't seem any different than regular phone service.

Getting set up took a few minutes. But the only real problem was user error. Because of the way my home network is set up, I had to give the adapter a static IP address rather than using DHCP. The problem arose when I entered the IP address of the computer that I used as my gateway before getting a wireless adapter. After a bit of fiddling with this and that, I noticed the error, changed the gateway IP address, restarted the VoIP adapter, and viola! The phone came up!

As soon as our phone number finishes getting switched from our Qwest line to our Vonage line, we will say a happy farewell to Qwest and their so-called "spirit of service": the spirit of service that prompted them to call us incesantly about adding services back in that we had cancelled (at least they haven't called since I finally asked them to stop calling); the spirit of service that has prevented them from making DSL available where we are (we're using Comcast, but would rather use DSL because its cheaper). Yeah, some spirit of service guys.

With Vonage, for the price of bare basic Qwest service, we get unlimited long distance, caller ID, and more.

Goodbye Qwest. Don't call us. We won't call you...unless we move to a home where DSL is available.