FullTimer

:haha:Yea, thanks sparky. I need your vonage unit like another hole in my head! I just bought mine at Circuit City and plan to return it this weekend for refund and then cancel vonage service for my 14 day trial period refund. They had the gaul to claim that satellite voIP performance was "generally good." The truth is it's generally UNUSABLE except when normal people are asleep and aren't taking phone calls anyway.

Thanks Aggr3, Really, your insights seem right on. My problem is I just signed up with DWay on March 3, and now just setup voIP on it - so no real experience with either system. I just didn't realize - and almost couldn't believe - how absolutely terrible the upload speed is on the DW6000 much of the time. I hit the road for a 6-month RV trip before long, so I wanted to get all my portable units ready to roll beforehand. I don't know if you or anyone else out there uses a portable DW6000 system. This will be my first year on the road with it. Obviously DWay is the only option for RVers who need reliable internet. Some campgrounds have WiFi but you can't depend on it being there when you need it. It's just too bad we can't get the Hughes European DW6040 unit in the USA. I think it would solve the voIP problem. At least that's what Hughes designed it to do.

voIP on a DSL connection (according to Vonage) needs 90kbps continuously both up and down. Their internet site offers a "bandwidth saver" feature that allow that number to be reduced to 60 or 30 kbps and they said some people did not notice any important difference. So I tried it at 30 kbps. Result: when we did tests mornings of March 6 & 7, the voice received over DW6000 connection was generally very good and the voice transmitted was also pretty good but had small amount of breakup and failure to pickup part of first word spoken. I made calls to other people during the course of the day and as long as turned off my PC load on the transmitter, the person I called could hear me fine (note: I always hear them fine - that is the receive side) . However, we found timing is everything with the DW6000 connection. When we made a call about 5 PM Mountain Time (Arizona) the call recipient could not understand us at all. The UP speed was about 11-12 kbps. Clearly not enough even for the lowest voIP setting on Vonage's bandwidth saver. So I'm guessing that voIP might make a good daytime phone system - or whenever UP link speeds are not severely degraded.

This nube looking for wisdom and experience with using Vonage with Direcway.