Anybody tried out SunRocket (VOIP, $199/year) yet? Price looks nice and I'm reading mixed reviews, but service may depend on broadband carriers. Anyone on Cox using SunRocket?

one thing you may want to remember is that it requires bandwidth and you dont magically get more(as far as i know). so if you are using a good amount of bandwidth, i think your call is going to be choppy 56k style. however, i cant say that for sure as i have not tried it for those specific reasons. that and you get fucked as the national do not call list does not apply somehow.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

The Do Not Call list doesn't really bother me because I'd gain caller ID, which I don't have now.

When you set it up, the phone adapter goes between the cable modem and your router, so I'm wondering if it segments off some minimum amount of dedicated bandwidth for itself.

I'm giving it a shot and I'll pass on results.

i dunno, im not liking the idea that i can use my 56K modem on it. ^^
yeah. id love to hear how it works out.


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

I've got SunRocket on Cox cable. It's not bad. It's not as good as a landline but then again, I've never heard of VoIP being as good as landlines. They've had a few outages due to their network getting swamped but they're VERY quick at responding to the outages and getting the network back up and running. Their Customer Service is also top notch. I've never been put on hold that I can remember of. The only problem I seem to have is occasionally I'll get an echo, which I hear with a quick phone call to customer support and a reboot of the "gizmo", they can resolve the problem, I'm just lazy and it doesn't bother me that much since it only seems to happen when I'm talking to my mother. It's also possible that I could be having that issue because I have the "gizmo" after the firewall instead of between the cable modem and firewall/router like they recommend. When you place the "gizmo" between the cable modem and firewall/router, the gizmo automatically limits the bandwidth to your firewall at all times to give your calls the proper amount of bandwidth. But I also hear that doing this will disable the ability to do port forwarding, but I haven't tried it. Like I said, it doesn't really bother me all that much since I really don't spend a lot of time on the phone as it is. I also haven't tested the E911 service but I've been told it is working for my phone.

Pro's:
Great Customer Service
Cheap
So far I've been able to use my Fax Machine with no problem
I've also been able to use my Tivo with no problem
They keep you updated very well by email about things going on and service outages

Con's:
Locked "gizmo" device
Echo's (which is probably fixable, like I said, I'm lazy)
service has gone down a few times for a couple hours (have SOME form of backup like a cell phone)

Thats about it. I'm a pretty heavy user as far as bandwidth goes (use newsgroups and torrents) and I haven't had a problem...although there is a plugin for Azureus that allows you to schedule it to limit bandwidth, which I do. I only seem to notice problems if I saturate the upstream. I haven't had problems with downstream. I leave about 20-30 kB available upstream when I'm home so the VoIP upstream doesn't crap out.


Hopefully this was helpful

Thanks for the feedback... I think I'm going to try sticking it before the firewall and see if I notice much difference in everyday downloads. Good to hear that you're having a positive FAX experience. I assume you're talking about outgoing-only, right? From what I'm reading incomming doesn't work at all or very well. I'm hoping it works out because I'd really love to kick verizon to the curb.

Yeah I have no use for incoming faxes. I attempted to get my fax machine to answer on distinctive ring only but I can't seem to get it set up correctly to do it and doesn't answer at all. I was going to have it only answer on the signature line that you can get setup with Sunrocket. Ah well. Not a big deal. Either way, no matter which VoIP provider you choose, be sure to always have some other form of communication, like a cell phone. I have several friends which use different VoIP providers and they all have their issues. Quality isn't great, no E911, service disconnects, etc. The one so far that I talk to I think has been the worst was my friend that uses packet8. Every time I talk to him it sounds like he's on a horrible cell phone connection.

Oh, a couple of more features I like about sunrocket:
Music on hold (you don't get to choose what kind of music)
Call blocking (great for constant wrong # callers or bill collectors looking for someone that used to be at your #)
Click to call (online contact list you just click to dial their #)
Call logs (incoming, outgoing, missed)

Also, just so you know, which ever credit card you give them to activate the service will be automagically billed monthly if you don't pay for the years worth of service.

So far so good... sometimes I can hear a faint echo of my voice but I'm liking it so far.

Apparently they can fix the echo if you give them a call or do the instant messaging session with them. Most likely they'll change a few things (probably something with the codec) on your gizmo and have you restart it. Like I said, I've been too lazy to bother getting it fixed because it doesn't really bother me that much. I have had about 2 outages the past week but nothing bad.

Verizon is now dumped as luck with SunRocket has been good thus far.

Had my first 3 way calling with SunRocket. Echoing was much worse. I could hear myself and the other two parties echoing. The other two parties though could only hear themselves echoing. Not a huge surprise though as it uses that much more bandwidth when you're doing a three way call. Maybe I'll do an instant messaging session with them tomorrow asking if there's something they can do about it...but if they can't, it's not a biggie. I RARELY perform 3 way calls. It's still worth the money I'm paying. All the other standard landline unlimited long distance services are way too expensive.

sunROCKET went down like a meteor. Crashed burned and took all those money munchers with it.

It is still around, they either sold themselves to or rebranded themselves to Teleblend.

But I'd just get the new MagicJack rather than deal with Teleblend, reviews on their customer service are abysmal.

This is all theoretical, I haven't used anything besides my mobile phone for years.