So I just got my VOIP router in the mail today and I immediately tried a couple calls on it. We've got Wildblue satellite internet, 1.0M download, 200K upload. I tested out the upload speed today and it came back with 237kbps at toast.net, so the bandwidth is there, but the far end couldn't hear half of what I was saying. I heard pretty much everything from the far end, so that worked all right. I'm going to call the company, voip.com tomorrow and see if they have any suggestions on how to tweek it, but I'm not holding out much hope. I fear it's going back from whence it came. Anyone else have any experience with VOIP?

I set a VOIP system up for a friend, and when we tested it, it worked perfectly. A few weeks later, however, they said that the system had stopped working completely - no-one could hear anything at either end when phoning people. It took me a while to figure it out, but the cause was their fax machine. It didn't stop calls coming in or going out, but did stop the actual voice from moving around. Unplugging it during a call allowed you to hear everything crystal clear. Plug it back in and everything went silent. It had all the filters and everything else attached, nothing wrong with the setup at all.

Also, VOIP phones are very sensitive to interference, in my experience. Try not to use it near your PC, near a wireless router or any sort of large electrical appliance and see if that helps. If not, phone the company that made the phone who will more than likely have a troubleshooting sheet where they can simply read off what has caused the problem in the past. Finally, if you can get hold of a wired VOIP phone (assuming yours is wireless) or vice verca, see if that makes a difference.

Where do you live and what kind of modem did you get?
I have had great service with my VIOP package. I live in Gatineau, Quebec and I took great pleasure in dumping BELL and Videotron to get my phone rolled into one package with internet access. I recently had my free cable disconnected and that is one of the reasons I went with a new service. I wasn't going to pay almost 100 dollars for phone, TV and internet. Now I get better internet service with much higher speeds than Videotron plus a Canada wide free unlimited long distance with 2 lines, call waiting, call display and all the "*" services for free. For TV, I have found quite a few places on the internet to get free TV and movies on demand, no commercials, no stupid little logos or PIPs flying all over my screen anymore and I can pause M.A.S.H. or whatever I'm watching while I go get a beer or other attitude adjustments. To quote Bill Gates talking about availability of traditionaly broadcast media, "we will laugh at what we had". ...I think I'll go watch some Pink Panther" cartoons, maybe the one where he cuts everything in half with the power saw.

VoIp will have many issues if your ISP is a Satellite system. Any VoIP service should be able to tell you that. The Latency is to high, even if you have good pings.
I work with VoIP everyday as my job.
Even a cable system or DSL would have problems if the latency was bad, but satellite is going to be very bad.

-sean

Just curious. Who did you go with who wasn't Bell or Videotron? on the other hand,talking about freebies. What IP TV sites would you recommend?

i've had the best experience with my VOIP i have vonage i use to have bellsouth it was pretty cheep like 25 a month but we could not make any long distance calls, no caller id, and voice mail was for and extra cost. but when we got vonage we could call anywhere in the US and som european nations it's seven dollars more than bellsouth but the extra features like voicemail caller ID and many more is worth that seven dollars.