Vonage
A year and a half ago we were paying roughly $40 per month to our local phone provider for local phone service and voice mail. On top of that, we were using prepaid calling cards for long distance service. I had long been curious about the new voice-over-IP services that provide phone service through your internet connection (see how it works). I was reluctant to switch for a long time, primarily because I doubted that the call quality would be very good (we weren’t worried about having phone service in an emergency since we had an inexpensive cell phone plan).
We decided to make the switch. We wanted to use Vonage, but at the time they were unable to “port” our phone number to their service. So we tried Earthlink trueVoice instead (very bad idea!). But by the end of our bad experience with trueVoice, Vonage was able to port our number, so we switched to them.
I’m very pleased with the results. Once we adjusted the call quality settings, we had very few problems; there are only occasional temporary glitches. We were able to keep our existing phone number, and when we travel to visit family we can even bring our phone along and set up using their internet connection. And additional services like caller ID are included for free (with our local provider we didn’t think it was worth paying extra for these services so we didn’t). Most importantly, our monthly costs including long distance have gone from $50+ to roughly $19 (we found the 500-minute plan quite sufficient for our usage). You can also save money by referring your friends to Vonage; if they sign up using your referral, you get two months of free service!
If you have a reliable high-speed internet connection, I highly recommend you try one of the voice-over-IP providers. We have had a good experience with Vonage and recommend them.
Tags: finance, Penny pinching, personal-finance, saving-money, trueVoice, voice-over-IP, Vonage
April 12th, 2007 at 7:17 am
I have used Vonage for over a year now, and I have had a similar experience. I am very pleased with the service. There have been a few times where I couldn’t get a dialtone, but usually a router reset fixed it. In the worst case, I didn’t have service for about 4 hours one afternoon, but when I checked online, the outage was already a known issue and being worked on. I’m not even using QoS routing, and I’ve never had issues, of course I never download large files while talking on the phone.
I’m using the unlimited plan for $25/month because I use it for both work and personal calls. For a while I had a separate fax line for $10/month more, but I didn’t use it enough to justify the cost so I canceled it.
April 17th, 2007 at 9:29 am
Unfortunately, the future of Vonage looks grim due to patent infringements.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2007-04-15-vonage-usat_N.htm