Tivo and Vonage: Abandon Hope

I spent far too long last week trying to make this work. The long and short of it: Vonage is utterly unreliable at my location at data speeds above 4800 bps. Your mileage will vary -- this is highly dependent on network congestion and routing (I use Cox Communications in Rhode Island). At certain times of day, I had 70% success rates on connections and 60-75 minute calls. At other times of day, it was 25% and 5-10 minutes. The internal Vonage modem is hopeless, numerous people have gotten external modems to work. It is crucial that you study the manual to force speeds down -- the link will drop if you attempt to autonegotiate.

After several evenings of trying, I had finished guided setup which required an 87 minute call. Once the modem was properly configured, it took at least 15 tries to complete. However, I could never successfully download the upgrade I needed for wireless connectivity (the long-term solution). I abandoned hope and did it after hours in a conference room at work -- which was so easy. Just hook it up to a nearby projector. Tivo complained about no svideo input, but it could be tricked by momentary use of a loopback cable. With a 56K connection, the upgrade took 70+ minutes to download, so I was looking at 6+ hours at 4800 bps at home. Which is never going to happen with Vonage.

Summary: If you use Vonage for your only line, do not buy a Tivo unless you have a closet full of old modems and a liberal work environment. For something that is supposed to be easy to use, I was appalled. After all, my Tivo (Toshiba SD-400) has a built-in DVD player. It would be trivial to offer upgrades via downloadable CD image. Based on this Tivo is going to be eaten alive by cable-company STBs (though to be fair, my parents two from Time Warner have crashed three times with total data loss).

Edit: I admit imprecision in the above. Broadband works fine in daily use (as I've used it ever since). However, except for a handful of wired cards (mostly old versions currently difficult to acquire), it doesn't work out of the box. Instead you have to wait for four hours of modem downloads to get the version that supports wireless and a broad range of wired cards. And that download will never happen if you have Vonage. Unless you drag it to a friend's house. They don't put that in the radio ads.

Comments

[akr]

You can get it to work by fixing prefixes to the dialout number to slow tivo to 9600kbps. Try ,#096 or *99, Mine is a series 3, worked fine.

[Justin]

I have had simmilar experiences with Tivo. My problem surrounds the fact that Tivo does not indicate on their box that VoIP does not work, and their technical assistence department is utterly useless. However it takes 45 minutes to find out this fact due to the enormously long hold times.

I also cannot get the ,#401 dialing prefix to work either, and while vonage tries to help me out, their instructions apparently only work on Tivo Series one boxes, as the series 2 boxes have had these features removed. My last hope is to try a dsl filter and see if I can stay connected long enough to get through guided setup. I doubt this will work, and even if it does work, 6 hours is not my idea of a good time. Tivo will not address the issues of shipping the series 2 boxes with the antiquated version of their software instead of 4.01b.

I bought the tivo because the interface is supposed to be better. However, had I known that this kind of problem would occur, I never would have bought it. Replaytv boxes have an ethernet port in the back. They are cheaper, and from what I understand, the video quality is better.

[gse]

With the regular Tivo (series 2 at least), you can buy a $35 USB ethernet adapter and hook it straight to your broadband. Much better than running over phone lines.

[Chene Godsey]

Vonage and DirecTV have been a nightmare. My attempt to save a few bucks a month has come back to bite me.

Everytime I call Vonage they tell me to do something different. I've tried the DSL filter and numerous codes to slow the modem speends down without any success.

I am about to drive the damn thing to my parents house and let it dial in there.

[Chad]

Give ,#019 a shot. A don't use it anymore, but I had pretty good success with it. I run Tivo over the broadband connection now, but ,#019 worked pretty well with Vonage.