AT&T CallVantage
Jun/22/2008 21:17 Filed in: Personal
I finally took the plunge into VoIP telephony at
home last week, ordering AT&T's CallVantage
service for my home phone. In the past, I've never
been a big fan of similar services like Vonage,
because your phone calls took away from your
available Internet bandwidth. If you were
downloading a large file, or watching some kind of
streaming video on the Internet and a phone call
came in, it would often result in the person's
voice getting all choppy and impossible to
understand. Not only that, but the monthly pricing
didn't seem like it was much better than just
having a good old-fashioned, reliable phone line.
(At least, that was true for people like me, who
don't make many long-distance calls.)
A few factors came together to make CallVantage look promising though. For starters, I recently signed up for AT&T's U-Verse service, which gives me TV stations over Internet, as well as a broadband connection using a variation of DSL. (I'm currently subscribed with their fastest package, giving me 10Mbit download speeds, and 1.5Mbit upload speeds. Far superior to the 6Mbit down/1Mbit up that was the fastest they offered with standard DSL service.) The problem with U-Verse is, AT&T requires you keep a standard phone line as part of your package right now. That is, *unless* you subscribe to AT&T CallVantage and ask for your existing phone number of your land line to be transferred over to it! That provides a "loophole" where you're able to keep U-Verse but ditch the monthly phone line bill. Since I already have AT&T for my cellular provider, that gives an instant $5 per month discount on CallVantage too, bringing it to only $19.95 per month for unlimited nationwide calling. In addition, the D-Link adapter issued with CallVantage service has the ability to prioritize VoIP traffic as it passes everything else through it. So it's possible to attach it to the back of the U-Verse router, followed by placing a switch behind it, ensuring your voice calls always get through without choppiness, so matter what else you're trying to do on the Internet simultaneously.
A few factors came together to make CallVantage look promising though. For starters, I recently signed up for AT&T's U-Verse service, which gives me TV stations over Internet, as well as a broadband connection using a variation of DSL. (I'm currently subscribed with their fastest package, giving me 10Mbit download speeds, and 1.5Mbit upload speeds. Far superior to the 6Mbit down/1Mbit up that was the fastest they offered with standard DSL service.) The problem with U-Verse is, AT&T requires you keep a standard phone line as part of your package right now. That is, *unless* you subscribe to AT&T CallVantage and ask for your existing phone number of your land line to be transferred over to it! That provides a "loophole" where you're able to keep U-Verse but ditch the monthly phone line bill. Since I already have AT&T for my cellular provider, that gives an instant $5 per month discount on CallVantage too, bringing it to only $19.95 per month for unlimited nationwide calling. In addition, the D-Link adapter issued with CallVantage service has the ability to prioritize VoIP traffic as it passes everything else through it. So it's possible to attach it to the back of the U-Verse router, followed by placing a switch behind it, ensuring your voice calls always get through without choppiness, so matter what else you're trying to do on the Internet simultaneously.