Recommend new products and services
Has anyone discovered any new products and/or services that are so great you'd like to share them with the forum.
Mine is zip.ca. Most of you have probably heard of it ...... it's a DVD delivery service. $24.95/mo; you can have 4 DVD's out at a time and keep them for as long as you want. You return them by mail in a SASE. They have a huge catalogue and it's especially good for episodic TV ...... I love watching a whole season over the course of a week. Customer service department is totally on the ball. I rate it 9.5/10 ....... only because nothing's perfect.
Mine is zip.ca. Most of you have probably heard of it ...... it's a DVD delivery service. $24.95/mo; you can have 4 DVD's out at a time and keep them for as long as you want. You return them by mail in a SASE. They have a huge catalogue and it's especially good for episodic TV ...... I love watching a whole season over the course of a week. Customer service department is totally on the ball. I rate it 9.5/10 ....... only because nothing's perfect.
Comments
Use your internet connection to make phone calls.
I do recommend Vonage.ca if you frequently call long distance in your home province / North America or notice all those features are getting expensive. There are of course some caveats for what could still be a pioneer era.
I already owned a LinkSys router when I ordered the service but they sent me another LinkSys box. All I had to do was plug it into my existing hardware. I thought they might send me the adapter to plug into my existing linksys box. Choose your own broadband router vendor if you like. However, Vonage and Cisco have a parternship (Cisco acquired LinkSys) so you can likely now buy a router with native Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This part might be easy stuff if you just pick up a Vonage kit at FutureShop / Best Buy or RadioShack / The Source.
I can only comment on Toronto based ISPs. I haven't used Sympatico in a while so need to use a Rogers example. I would think you'll need a high speed ISP for VoIP. The default setting for Vonage is 90 Kbps which is about 11 KB/s. In the Rogers world this might equate to the LITE option. Any higher and you've got a fat pipe. Now 90 Kbps is the highest sound quality. I have a friend who's in the telecom business and he mentioned 50 Kbps which is the middle option for bandwidth at Vonage. I only use the highest setting and don't want to change it.
Now there is a monthly bandwidth cap with Rogers but it's 60 GB. I believe all ISPs now have an enforced bandwidth cap? I've calculated at 90 Kbps you'll get about 25 hours of phone time for every 1 GB. So even if you budget 10 GB for voice, 250 hours per month is good. You'll have 10 hours of voice a day plus another 50 GB left over for chat, vm, email, surfing and downloading - should be adequate. So check with your ISP to see what the bandwidth cap is.
One thing that wasn't so clear to me and of course now I see it in the ads is a fax line costs extra. My solution was to give the fax machine back to reclaim some real estate. My buddy gave it to me in the 1st place so he gets some hardware after returning from overseas. I'd rather scan and email documents, I'm not into fax anymore.
A very important point for those with children and/or in less populated areas and/or with a known medical condition. I just think the larger the family and the more remote the less I'd want to use Vonage. There are at least 2 reasons for this. Of course if the power goes out - no more phone. I know this is a forum of poker players but there is risk tolerance in this decision. Sure you could use a mobile phone but I don't know how reliable these are remotely. One of the features of Vonage is failover to another phone number (mobile) if service is interrupted. This may take a few hours to cutover. Also, you won't be using the classic 911 service anymore. You'll be using something called a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) which is explained in the FAQ. They are starting to roll out Enhanced 911 which might be analagous to classic 911 service.
I like the conference call option. I've only used it once but it was great to talk with 2 relatives in 2 locations for "free". I don't like that we lost call privacy. I'm hoping Vonage will allow me to block those annoying 1-800-TELEMARKETERS that keep calling. I have to remind Vonage about that.
The bottom line is our phone bill is less per month and I don't notice any difference in audio quality. Sometimes I think I pick up the phone and dial too quck and have to retry. Ironically on the audio quality I've noticed, voicemail for instance, it's even louder with Vonage! I give it 8.5 out of 10 just because I want even greater control over my phone.