Just work you stupid thing. Vonage sucks.

Recently, I got Vonage VOIP service for home. Luckily, I didn't cancel our regular phone number. The quality has two issues: there is a longer latency. I did a little ping/pong with my dad last weekend and the latency was at least 3x compared to my cell phone. But in reality, this is not that bad as it's still <1s.

But worse, the international quality is not always great. Certainly, the technology is not there yet. The worse thing about this is all the setup. First, I attached the Linksys phone router to one of our two netgear wireless devices at home. The voice quality was horrid. The problem is that the phone router needs to be in front to give high priority to voice packets to reduce the latency. But if I do that, I cannot VPN to my work (who knows why, but our IT guy told me that others have had this problem). So I had to put another router in front of all of these. At this point, comcast runs into all sorts of problems. I wish it just worked -- like regular, old phones. I'm cancelling vonage soon unless this *just* works. We do make a decent amount of international calls. So I guess I wanted to save some cash and play with cool technology. I should have tried out skype first as it's easier to setup. I've spent at least a couple of hours unplugging network/power cabels to get something as simple as a phone to work. My grand parents had phones many years ago. Why can't it be as simple and reliable?

In a recent talk in Stanford's EE380, the lecturer said networking is the opposite of drugs dealing: with drugs, the first packet is free and the rest are not, but with networks the first packet is expensive but the rest are almost free.