Carl Tyler's Blog

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Shiver me timbers landlubbers, yesterday the Vonage box that connects my telephone to the Internet arrived. The box is about the size of a portable CD player, and I just plugged it straight into my linksys router. 2 minutes later I was able to make and receive calls on my regular phone, very very cool. So 34.99 a month for unlimited calls to anywhere in the US and Canada, I called my sister in the UK for a really low rate of 5cents a minute, and she never even knew it wasn't a regular phone.

What is pretty smart is their referral program, if you want to sign up I can get you a free month, just send me an email with your email and I'll get the stuff sent to you. If you are thinking about getting Vonage, sign up via this link.

You can take this device and plug it in wherever you can find an ethernet connection, so I was thinking about where this device is going to be really useful, and here are the two key things I have come up with:

1. Travelling - When people call you, they wont know you're plugged into the internet connection at the Hilton in Japan, or the Holiday Inn in Sioux Falls, it will be your regular number for calling out and receiving calls on. Imagine this scenario, you're in Amsterdam, the hotel has high speed internet but want to charge you 80 cents a minute for international calls back to the US(cheap for most hotels), you plug this box into the internet connection, and you can call anywhere in the US for no extra charge above the hotels internet fee. That's pretty smart.
2. Trade Shows - Ever had that huge bill from a tradeshow for getting the phone on the booth, you know they charge like 200 bucks to drop the line for 2 days, and then for each call. Well with this Vonage box, you'd plug it into the shows internet connection and you can make and receive calls all day long without paying those "rip off" merchants at shows any more money than you have to.

So I like how it is so far, it even has a worldwide power supply so isn't only 110 volts. I would highly recommend it, I love the features like getting my voicemails sent to my email as a wav file, this kind of technology along with things like Skype and the VoIP in products like Lotus instant Messaging (Sametime) has to have the telecom companies worried, if it isn't they should be!

Don't forget, today is International Talk Like a Pirate day.!