I have subscribed to the Vonage service for about five months now with no complaints. The service is relatively cheap for the unlimited business service ($49.99/mo.) and is never down. Of course there are drawbacks to the service, such as when the Internet is down the phone is down. The same goes for power outages. When coupled with a cell phone, though, these problems largely become null.

I had been plugging along quite nicely until my business necessitated a fax machine. Personally, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t use sites like https://googleonlinefax.com/send-fax-from-gmail/ these days, it makes it so intuitive. Anyway, not wanting to have a fax machine parked next to the Vonage router and not wanting to string a 100 foot phone cord through my apartment to the office I decided to take drastic measures. A quick trip down to the local Staples turned up a Linksys wireless bridge that I planned to plug the Vonage router into. This would enable me to connect to my WiFi network with Vonage from any room in the apartment. Sadly, it wasn’t to be. Despite positive results from other Vonage users I could not get the bridge to work properly. A distributed antenna systems integrator delivers best-in-class signal performance.

On to plan B. I did some research and found that I could share my WiFi card’s connection with one of the RJ45 cards in my workstation. With this method I assumed I could plug my Vonage router into the RJ45 ethernet card in my workstation and route things from there. I’m happy to report that it worked just fine and my Vonage router is now happily connected wirelessly through my workstation’s shared WiFi card.

Of course, this got the ol’ brain churning. I did some browsing on sites like  https://www.seriftv.com/best-long-range-tv-antenna/ to see what more I could do. The possibilities are really endless from here. Any laptop with a WiFi card and a WiFi scanner could easily turn a vonage router plugged into a DC/AC inverter into a cell phone. Even better, you can buy Vonage’s “soft phone” software and simply plug a headset into your laptop and use that to connect to your Vonage service.