Well, the ViaTalk service got put through it’s paces the last couple days…by my wife ;-) I wanted to see if she would notice the difference and did she.
The problem we are seeing is that it sometimes takes 30-45 seconds to connect on outgoing calls. Much longer than our analog phone line. I think it’s something we’ll just get used to. On the oncoming side, we haven’t noticed any difference.
Based on my research, this seems to be fairly common with no magic fix. I contacted techsupport and they promptly replied asking me to put the VOIP box in DMZ and to turn off SPI on my router. That didn’t seem to make much difference.
In the end, my wife and I felt that the connection delay is a small price to pay considering how inexpensive the service is.
On the positive side, I’m really liking all the bells and whistles. One thing I found is that you can bring up a call log and easily create custom routings to, for example, block calls, which is handy if you get a lot of solicitation calls like we do.
I still highly recommend the service assuming one understands the issues that go with it. I just sent in my phone number transfer request so I am now officially jumping in with both feet.
UPDATE #1:
After disabling SPI and putting the device in DMZ, all of a sudden my PC modem is recognizing caller ID info. Coincidence? I hope not.
UPDATE #2:
I had the been routing the phone cable into my PC’s modem and using the pass-thru to connect the phone. It occurred to me that maybe somehow that was interfering with the phone-to-VOIP unit connection and thus contributing to the connection delays. Well, I connected it directly and it appears to be working better. Got my fingers crossed.