I’ve been toying with the idea of making the switch for a while now. Thing is, I don’t personally know anyone that has used this company. So that’s why I humbly come before the Teeming Masses. Have any of you used Vonage and how was the experiance?
Seems more IMHO, but anyway:
I’ve been using Vonage since 2003. I’ve been fairly well pleased.
Pros:
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Cheap! Preposterously cheap. You think about phone calls in an entirely different way when they’re unlimited.
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Features: Plenty. 3-way calling, voicemail, voicemail-to-email, voicemail-to-email-transcription, call forwarding, simulring, etc.
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Any area code you like. Kind of handy. I used this with a business line, so calls from clients in Boston (where most of my clients are, but where I am not) were local for them. My business partner’s family has even sent their relatives in the Philippines a Vonage phone that has a California area code, so international calls are nothing.
Cons: -
Sound quality is not 100% up to regular landline standards. There can sometimes be strange echos, etc.
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Major internet traffic in your house during a call can seriously screw up sound quality. That is, if you decide to upload or download a 600-MB file in the middle of a call (quite common in my house), you could wind up sounding like Mr. Roboto to the person on the other end of the line. Similarly, if you host a 3-way call, you CANNOT download/upload anything bigger than a web page, or else both of the other parties will notice the decline in sound quality
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If your internet connection goes out, your phone goes out. Unfortunately, this happens at least once a week to me. It’s the single biggest drawback to VOIP. But since my phone is tied through my cable modem and router, I can’t afford to take it off-line for a week or more to see if the problem is being caused by my modem, my router, my vonage box, or my ISP kicking me off. I can’t be without a phone that long to diagnose it.
Really? I have never had that problem on my Vonage lines. (I have had this on other VoIP phones though.)
That is quite true. Been there. Learned to avoid doing that.
True - BUT, if your internet connection goes down, you can set it to fail over to another number (like your cell phone) which is quite an improvement over losing your normal land line and having no incoming calls at all.
My experience has been tremendously good with Vonage. I have used others as I said above. (Packet8 was awful). Vonage does what it says it will do at a price point that is very nice.
Quick hijack - is this something you do in your settings beforehand, or something you need to do when it goes out? I can’t see how you’d be able to do it if your connection was out…??
I ask because our company uses Vonage for our support guy’s phone. I want to tell him to set this setting if it’s there!
You can do it anytime, from Vonage’s website. You can control all the features from the website.
I’ve been using Vonage for several years, and I’m quite happy with it. Other than killing call quality when I run bittorrent, it has been a good quality line most of the time. Even better than the old landlines I’ve had in some older buildings.
The fun thing about it is when AT&T calls asking me to switch back. They can’t touch the price and shut up.
I’ve had Vonage for a few years and have also been mostly happy. One of the nice things about it kicking the calls to another line when the internet is down, is that it’s let’s me know that the internet is down. If someone calls your cell phone and find it odd that you’re not at home, you know the internet at your house is wonky. Same goes for trying to check your vonage voicemail and getting your cell voicemail instead.
Two problems I’ve had though. About once a month (sometimes more, sometimes less) I have to reboot the Vonage box, and two, the cordless phones I got with my kit, have a crappy battery life. Leaving them off the charger for more then a day renders them useless. Oh wait, one more, specific to my phones. A)you can’t page them when ringer is off, B)Once you hit the page button you HAVE to track down each phone and stop it from beeping.
I had it and I had constant problems. Customer service sucked. They were impossible to reach and when I did they would blame the problems on everyone else.
Also it was damn near impossible to get rid of them. When we decided to pull the plug they just kept on billing us anyway. They denied we had cancelled service. We had to waste lots of time with our credit card company to keep appealling charges. All in all, a big mistake.
I had a home security system installed after getting Vonage. The security rep told me they sometimes have problems with Vonage, so I should test my system at least monthly. I do, and I’ve never had a problem. It’s been about 2 years. I’m happy with it, but YMMV.
We have it and we’ve been mostly pleased. Our phone bill is around $30 a month, and includes such nice features as voice mail, call block, call forwarding, conference calling, and caller id.
We’ve had one blip when we didn’t have a phone for about two weeks, and the customer service (obviously outsourced to India) was not helpful. We ended up getting a technician to come out and fix it, and we got a half month’s credit on the phone bill.
All in all, considering the costs of Sprint or AT&T, I’m well pleased with Vonage.
I’ve heard that in some areas there can be problems with 911. If my phone number is a Boston area code, but I’m not really in Boston, I will end up calling the wrong 911.
Anyone know more about that?
It’s really not a problem. When you set up, Vonage prompts you through a special 911 registration process, so the authorities will pull up your real address when you call from the Vonage line.
What if you’re travelling, anyway to reset it? That’s the wife’s concern, we’ll be on vacation, child falls off mountain, Vonage has wrong 911, all is lost…
I’ve had to make several 911 calls on my Vonage line, and the EMS guys always showed up. I don’t have an odd area code for my location, but I do have an exchange that’s not normally available in my location.
Part of the reason I switched to Vonage was that when I moved 5 miles down the highway, Ameritech wouldn’t let me take my number with me. Switched the number to Vonage and it wasn’t a problem.
Like everything else with Vonage features, you can update it on their website whenever you need to. What I don’t know is if there’s any delay in getting the new 911 info active. I don’t take my Vonage with me when I travel.
I am about to swap Vonage out for VOIP from Comcast, more for convenience of billing than anything big. I’ve had Vonage for two years.
I had to buy a separate Telephone Adaptor when I set it up b/c the router they bundled sucked.
I have never been able to get rid of a soft background hiss.
I was very surprised the equipment they sent did not include a QOS setting so that the voice packets would take precedence over all other internet traffic (this may have since changed). As a consequence I suffer from poor connection when I’m using my bandwidth for other traffic at the same time.
Since my Internet is Comcast, maybe they screw with Vonage. I’m not a big conspiracist, so I doubt it. Anyway with both VOIP and Internet from the same provider I have one person to complain to…
Summary: Vonage is fine, and simple, for ordinary house phones. Inadequate in my house for my business line.
I have been happy with it. I like the many features, and I few complaints.
Shared opinions are better in IMHO rather than GQ, Moved.
samclem GQ moderator
We’re not big phone users, so Vonage works really well for us.
I might be hesitant to recommend it for people who are on the phone all the time.
We’re on the smaller plan, the non-unlimited one. I think it runs about $18 a month after taxes.
It doesn’t work with TiVo. That’s another drawback.
Odd - it works quite well with DirecTV DVR, pay per view, etc.
It works basically pretty well. You may also consider skype, which I think would be about 1/2 the cost (using their in and outgoing services), as your primary phone you would buy a skype adapter so you can plug it into your high speed modem (so you don’t have to use your computer directly) and that gives you a regular handset.