I've done VOIP for several years now.
I started on AT&T Callvantage VOIP for $35/month, and it was fine - worked exactly like a POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) phone line except that we always had to dial 10 digits for all calls - even local ones - and our answering machine wasn't able to detect that the caller had hung up and so we'd get long beeps at the end of answering machine messages. Neither was too big a deal, and we make a lot of international calls and were saving a lot over our local provider (Qwest), so we were happy. The quality of the service was excellent - the call quality seemed even better than our old line from Qwest for international calls, and the service never had any disruption. We put the callbox in front of our router - AT&T requires it, but aside from moving some CAT5 inputs around, everything worked with our home network without any issues. We were with CallVantage the first time for about 14 months.
Then, in a quest to save even more money we switched to Packet8 which was $30/month but offered unlimited international calling to all the countries that we call (Ireland, England and Poland). We gained 7 digit local calling - no more dialing our area code to call our neighbor - and the answering machine issue went away - and with Packet8 I could put the VOIP box behind our router which made me happier for reasons that I can't explain. But the voice quality of Packet8 was noticeably worse, and sometimes calls would drop. After talking to the technicians a bit, I made no progress on this and so I converted to a $5/month plan (to avoid the cancellation fee) and moved onto Vonage. We were with Packet8 about 6 months - it was cheap, but the call quality was unacceptably bad.
Switching to Vonage for $25/month was easy enough, they gave me yet another new VOIP box. I could still leave it behind my router. I still got 7 digit local calling, the call quality was better than Packet8 and close to CallVantage, and Vonage was cheaper than CallVantage, and we didn't have any more dropped calls. But, on Vonage our service would randomly die for fairly long periods of time. Vonage would be out for a day or two at least one weekend every couple of months. We would call and sometimes they'd say it was our ISP (Comcast) and less often they'd admit the problem was on their end. Since the weekend is when we make the most telephone calls, it wasn't long before my wife started to lose patience with the whole VOIP thing and especially Vonage. Still, we used Vonage for over a year.
Then we tried Mutualphone - which is an independent SIP reseller and we paid by the minute with no monthly fees. The price was cheap - our bill was ~$12/month for all of our calls. They are a "BYOB" provider - Bring Your Own [VOIP] Box". It was cheap to use, but got a lot of busy signals with Mutualphone and the call quality was poor and we were back to 10 digit calling with Mutualphone as well. This experiment last less than a month, and then we went back to CallVantage.
Back on CallVantage again now for the new lower price of $25/month, nothing has changed since we left them. The service is stable, with excellent call quality, and no performance issues or dropped calls. We are still using 10 digit dialing and our old answering machine still records beeps. We've been with CallVantage about 4 months now and we are happy with CallVantage and we are not likely to change providers in the near future.
Good luck
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