Vonage

[stugy]

I keep seeing these ads about Vonage and I certainly would save some money using it.........so is it a good deal, any problems, etc. We spend about $80 a month on our land line and long distance with AT&T. We do not currently have a cell phone. Incidentally our long distance includes local long distance since just about every area around us is a toll call.
Thanks
Pat

 

[TUGBrian]

use vonage here...even dropped the local house phone to use it. works fine as long as you have a steady and stable broadband internet connection.

voicemail leaves a bit to be desired for me though.

 

[UWSurfer]

AT&T offers an "ALL DISTANCE" plan from their website for $40/month which provides unlimited local and domestic LD within the US. We had it for over a year when one son had a girl friend 30 miles away and ran up our bill. They since split and I was looking for ways to lower our expenses I recently dropped it for a more limited local plan.

There was a thread here on Tug about Vontage months ago and those who have them are generally pretty happy. Those who decided it wasn't for them had a difficult time with the company cancelling service. The key with Vontage is you need to have a broadband internet service. In our home it was paired with the local phone line as DSL. We can get DSL independent of the home phone line but it costs about $10 more a month than having it with our home phone, at which point the cost savings of moving to Vontage or another provider are minimal.

IF you get your internet service via other means like your cable company, vontage would be appealing (at least to me). We don't subscribe to cable. I'm reading that Verizon and AT&T are building their infastructures to provide fiber service to more of their local customers and bundling phone, broadband and TV service over it. It is a growth area for them and expected to be a hot market for them over the next several years. Verizon offers their version called "FIOS" in some areas in SoCal and it's an attractive offering.

Bottom line is unless you get your internet service from someplace other than AT&T DSL, you might want to look at their ALL Distance plan. If you get broadband elsewhere, then Vontage could be attracitve.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

use vonage here...even dropped the local house phone to use it. works fine as long as you have a steady and stable broadband internet connection.

voicemail leaves a bit to be desired for me though.

I use Vonage and am quite pleased. One of the features I most appreciate is their voicemail. It includes almost all features at no extra charge for which local phone companies often charge extra.

But the big one for me is getting voice mail messages sent to my e-mail address, with actual message attached as a wave file. That means that I can save the actual message instead of trying to transcribe informatiion. That's a big help with my business activities; it makes it much easier to keep all of my project related information in one location. Plus should a question arise about information that was tranmsitted via voice mail, I can retrieve the actual message.

 

[TUGBrian]

id always read the voicemail translation service was an additional fee?

I only access vm through the vonage website, and it annoys me to no end.

 

[marsha77]

We've had VOIP for about 4 years now, and we would never go back to the land line - way to expensive. Sometimes we do get cut off, and it is down, but we pay less than 15.00 per month as opposed to 70.00 with the land line, so we're willing to live with that. We also have cell phones, that we can use.

Marsha

 

[Janette]

Our neighbors have Vontage and the calls aren't as clear as other services. I don't know if that is just with their phone. Also, we have to call them long distance. It isn't a problem for us as we have unlimited calls through another company, but I know of others in our neighborhood who complain.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

id always read the voicemail translation service was an additional fee?

I only access vm through the vonage website, and it annoys me to no end.

I don't know about VM translation, and that's not what I'm referring to. The actual voice mail message, in WAV format, is sent to your e-mail address.

Another nice aspect of that service is that I don't need to pick up the phone to know that I have voice mail. When I'm away from the phone I often don't remember to check for messages when I return. But I do check e-mail frequently, so if someone does leave a message while I'm away I will become aware of it sooner through the e-mail alert.

***

You also should be able to access voice mail directly from the phone. Just dial "*123" from your Vonage line, and you connect to Vonage voice mail. (You still need to input your password.)

If you are not on your Vonage line, then there are local direct access numbers you can call to access Vonage voice mail from any phone.

This is all explained in the VoiceMail Plus area on the Vonage site. (Voicemail Plus is the basic, no extra charges Vonage VoiceMail service.)

 

[Nancy]

Love it

We have it and really like it. I like being able to transfer phones, etc. as I live 2 places. People call one of our home phones and have no idea where we really are!

Nancy

 

[Bucky]

I've had Vonage for over 4 years and love it. I'm on the 500 minute a month plan anywhere within the US and Canada. I don't need the unlimited plan and as such my total monthly bill including taxes is only $20.

In addition to the email forwarding mentioned above my favorite feature is having the phone ring on my cell phone at the same time it rings on my home phone. That way if I'm at the store or anywhere else as far as that goes, I don't miss any calls.

 

[ausman]

We had Vonage from Jan - Sept 08, and and at my wife's insistance reverted to Verizon. She was right.

There were too many dropped calls, too many outages, and too many friends complaining about our poor phone service and not being able to reach us.

I liked the features and if we didn't have to receive all telemarketers calls and all other types of calls I would have kept it, we gave it a very fair run.

I did dislike the upkeep involved, resetting the Vonage box and the router and the modem when calls where dropped, and the constant checking, phoning our number from work to see if it was still working.

Hope they get it right.

As when I was investigating, it seems your mileage may vary.

 

[T_R_Oglodyte]

We had Vonage from Jan - Sept 08, and and at my wife's insistance reverted to Verizon. She was right.

There were too many dropped calls, too many outages, and too many friends complaining about our poor phone service and not being able to reach us.

I liked the features and if we didn't have to receive all telemarketers calls and all other types of calls I would have kept it, we gave it a very fair run.

I did dislike the upkeep involved, resetting the Vonage box and the router and the modem when calls where dropped, and the constant checking, phoning our number from work to see if it was still working.

Hope they get it right.

As when I was investigating, it seems your mileage may vary.

I've had Vonage for about three or four years now, and I've never had a single one of those problems. It's been only slightly less reliable than regular Qwest service, but since calls are automatically routed to my cell phone when service is down it's actually even more reliable than Qwest.

*****

Another bonus. Every now and then when a long distance phone service telemarketer makes it through to me and they ask who my local phone service provider is, I tell them "I don't have local phone service." They are totally unprepared for that answer. You can tell they've been trained to follow a script, but they just got an answer that didn't fit the script. They mumble and they fumble, but they can't figure out what to say. About half the time they ask me again who my loocal phone provider is, and I say again that I don't have local phone service. Then they get even more confused.

 

[pammex]

Just another option but you may want to check out skype....

 

[BocaBum99]

I've used vonage for several years. The quality is only okay and I do have dropped call problems.

Skype has far superior quality.

 

[Emily]

We had Vonage from Jan - Sept 08, and and at my wife's insistance reverted to Verizon. She was right.

There were too many dropped calls, too many outages, and too many friends complaining about our poor phone service and not being able to reach us.

I liked the features and if we didn't have to receive all telemarketers calls and all other types of calls I would have kept it, we gave it a very fair run.

I did dislike the upkeep involved, resetting the Vonage box and the router and the modem when calls where dropped, and the constant checking, phoning our number from work to see if it was still working.

Hope they get it right.

As when I was investigating, it seems your mileage may vary.

We had all of those problems X 10. Over many, months they never got our calls straightened out and when we tried to cancel service it was a nightmare. The numbers (our business numbers) that were transferred in, they wouldn't relinquish and we went through our state utility commission to get the numbers back, the overcharges refunded and the service cancelled. It was almost 9 months of messed up phone service and weekly discussions about it. I've had babies with less pain and in less time.

 

[pammex]

We had all of those problems X 10. Over many, months they never got our calls straightened out and when we tried to cancel service it was a nightmare. The numbers (our business numbers) that were transferred in, they wouldn't relinquish and we went through our state utility commission to get the numbers back, the overcharges refunded and the service cancelled. It was almost 9 months of messed up phone service and weekly discussions about it. I've had babies with less pain and in less time.

That sounds horrible....

I have used skype a long time and am happy with it....

 

[BSQ]

I've been a vonage customer for going on about 5 years now. I have been pleased with it from the get go. The only issue I've had is my account was set up in the eastern time zone, and when I moved to the west coast, I had to go through tech support to get my account to be on pacific time. (voicemails would have the eastern time zone time stamp).

Here's what I like most about having Vonage:

• price
• living in TN I was able to get a CA phone number so my Mom didn't have to make long distance calls to talk to me
• I've lived in 3 states now and have had the same phone number
• NO telemarketing calls ... ever!

The only issues I've had is because of my phone number choice. When checking on certain accounts (like banking and Cable) I get routed to a CA call center when I needed someone not in CA.... fixed now that I've relocated back to So Cal.

It does cost extra if you want to be able to read your voice mails in text, but for me just getting an e-mail that I have a VM, and being able to listen to it over the computer are all I really need. All at no extra charge.