VOIP through Vonage in Hyderabad

Finally, I have broadband at home in Hyderabad. [ This is my first post from home ]. I signed up for the unlimited service which costs Rs1000+tax and provides a 256KBPS speed on downloads and 64/128 on uploads. Service is provided by SIFY and the qualityof the service is excellent. On initial pings to the gateway at their facility, we saw delays of 15ms and the installer called up the central office and some how got it down to 5ms.

My first test was to setup the Netgear Wireless Router and program the static IP. This required the installer to call in again with the mac address of the router and once that was added, everything worked liked a charm. I Was able to configure the wireless lan, and tested various sites including the ones in US which were blazing fast compared to what I have seen in my past experiences in Hyderabad.

Next I embarked on connecting the vonage router that I badly needed to keep in touch with friends and family back in the U.S. We hooked up the vonage router which comes with a nice feature of 110/220v adapter to the 220v power and connected it using a cat5 cable to the netgear router. My first call to the US was audible, but had a lot of packet drops and upon investigation, I found that vonage provides a bandwidth saver for connections that were not Cable/DSL quality. Couple of clicks on the vonage site, a reboot of the entire equipment after a couple of hours changed the call quality from worse to excellent. Since then, I called a couple of you from my new line and I could not hear any delays that you would normally hear on a VOIP line.

You will need :
1. A Wireless Router ( Get the ones that can take static ip + uid/password ). Do look for a 220v adapter for your router, its a pain to attach a converter in front of the adapter and the heat generated by the 110v to 220v converter is making me nervous.. I may go out and get a 220v adapter for the router tomorrow.

2. Basic Vonage adapter.. comes with the 110v/220v power cord.. so no issues here

3. A UPS would be a good addition, I will look for some during my first visit to the computer shops in ameerpet and will report back on how that goes.

4. A basic phone setup.. again, look for adapters that support 220v, using a 220 to 110v converter for the long term is a pain.