Even though I had a significant amount of trouble with my first attempt with home Voice Over IP using Vonage (update: my old phone number is now completely lost), I decided to make ONE more attempt and go with AT&T’s CallVantage VOIP service. While it’s a few dollars more a month ($29.99 for all you can eat long distance), I still felt it was a significant savings over my normal Verizon bill and offers some great services (such as Locate Me, which can ring multiple numbers, or email access to your voicemail, etc).

Here’s the 30 second lowdown on the install: I signed up on Saturday, the VOIP gateway adapter showed up yesterday. Installation wasn’t as smooth as I thought it was going to be - I spent about an hour trying to get the telephone adapter (TA) to configure behind my router (even though the documentation says you can), but the activation software reported it couldn’t find it.

I finally gave up with that configuration and put it in front of the router, and was easily able to activate it. Once it was complete and had finish updating the TA with new firmware (the website automatically did that), moving it back behind the router worked without problem.

So far I’m pretty happy with it - the voice quality is really good, and I haven’t seen the dropoff in network performance that I somewhat expected. I’ll have to run some bandwidth tests this weekend to see what the overall effect is.

Now, if I could only get my old phone number back.