I cannot answer your specific questions about those particular services.  However, I can say that this is one area where we have been able to cut our expenses over the years.  Commercial phone service in Ohio is expensive - my monthly phone bills including long distance averaged about $300 for two lines with features like roll-over, voice mail, etc.  We switched to Vonage and our bill is now about $90 with unlimited long distance and for our faxing, we switched to an e-Fax service (www.myfax.com) which costs us about $20/mo. 

Of course, to do VOIP phones, you have to have a high-speed Internet connection - which we already had, so it was not an added expenses.

We have been very happy with our current system and I cannot see ever going back to our local phone company.  We have had a few issues - sometimes our VOIP phones loose their connection, but this is usually easily rectified by rebooting the device and it doesn't happen all that often.  A bigger problem is that if you lose power, or your Internet connection goes out, you don't have phones.  But, we have a back-up generator and our Internet connection (T-1 line) has been very reliable. 

Best,
Robert A. Franco
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