Blog FeedA Giant Killer?
I recently moved into a new apartment half-way across the country from my family. I knew I’d need to make a lot of calls across the country in order to talk to my folks. Traditionally doing something like this would involve calling the phone company and signing up for some kind of deal on long distance. Well either that or signing my soul over to a cell phone company in a package deal where I’m committed to them for a lenghty contract. Not so fast, I signed up for Vonage and it’s really one of the best deals I’ve gotten in years and if something similar is available in your area I’d highly reccomend trying it.
Vonage is a telecommunications company that could not have existed until very recently. Rather than having to lay down lines from point to point, or even tap into specific lines already down, it uses the internet to route all your phone calls. All the calls are handled as Voice Over IP traffic. You get a box, plug one end into the phone and another into the router; after that everything else is just like working with the phone company. Once it’s plugged in you just pick up the phone, get a dial tone, and you’d never know the difference. The sound is clear, the installation painless and the price is wonderful. It’s a flat rate of 25 dollars a month which is less than half of what I would have had to pay the phone company for unlimited local and long distance phone calls.
This is a really easy service to use, it’s perfect fo the average Joe to use instead of dealing with the phone or cable company. Never once did I have to sit on hold for 40 minutes like I always do when my cable modem needs installation, nor will I ever get a surprise phone call because I called my mom for a little bit longer than I expected. Of course the big Tel-coms aren’t going anywhere, they for one thing have a great deal of inertia and broadband penetration rates are dramatically lower than telephone penetration rates. But just as MCI took on Ma’ Bell and managed to lower prices for consumers, VoIP phones are giving consumers even one more option, one we really should consisder as it’s a good one.
16th June | Reply
I’ve looked at Vonage and have decided to stay with Skype. Skype isn’t as convenient, particularly if you own a Mac, but it does run on a Pay-As-You-Go basis. We don’t tend to use the phone that much and so a flat monthly fee is far too expensive for our needs. A EUR 20.00 top-up on Skype lasts for many months so $20.00 per month is far too excessive.
At present we are still needing to maintain a mobile phone as well (again, Pay-As-You-Go) for emergency calls and calls while we are, uh, mobile.
17th June | Reply
I looked at skype but I wanted something that worked with a regular phone, and i didn’t need to buy a whole bunch of extra equipment for and goes on a flat-rate since I call people long-distance like every day for an extended period of time. And lastly that Skype doesn’t come with 911 of any kind for emergencies is well something I hope never comes up but I want it there if I need it. Skype seems a bit better though if you’re a light-weight telephone user but I just didn’t think they were offering as robust a package as I wanted.
26th June | Reply
I’ve been using Vonage for quite some time now, and I’ve been thrilled for the most part.
We used Bellsouth years ago, and frankly, Ma Bell sucks. They’re pretty much incompetent, couldn’t get a damn thing right, and got abusive with us about it. Long story nobody wants to hear, I’m sure, so suffice to say we dropped Bellsouth like a bad habit. It’ll be a cold day in hell when they get another dime from me.
We picked up cellular phones then and used them as our primary telephones. Worked pretty well for a couple years, but then we moved to our current home. It sits down in the bottom of a bit of a bowl, so the cell reception here isn’t too good unless you want to make calls from the attic.
Enter Vonage. Now I’ve got reliable telephone service at the house, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than what Time Warner Cable offers the same service for, and it’s not Bellsouth.
I’ve been very impressed with Vonage so far. They got slapped with some small regulatory fee a while back that the government required them to charge us. Got a letter from them stating that since they had no choice in the matter, they would be lowering their price by the same amount, so that my bill would be the same it had always been. Nice.
They do some pretty cool extra stuff, too. Around Christmas, they added a special number you could call so your kid could leave Santa a voicemail. That’s not anything hard to do, but none of my previous phone companies has ever done it. Kidzookie got a big kick out of it. Why haven’t I ever had that before?
They’ve got some pretty cool inventive features, too, that I tend to get a little excited about. Thank God for wifezilla, who is rather unimpressed by this stuff… her cooler head generally prevails. For a couple extra bucks a month, they’ll let you have another phone number in any area code they have service. Neat. My wife and her dad talk on the phone a lot, and it doesn’t really cost us anything beyond the flat rate now, but it eats up his long distance calling cards. Let’s get a Seneca number so he can call us free.
WIFEZILLA: Or… he could just call us and tell us to call him back.
Oh yeah.
One thing I didn’t like off the bat was jacking my phone into my router. I can only have one phone? Screw that. Plus, my router’s on the third floor… I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the damn phone or put it back. And if someone calls me, I’ll never know.
Turns out that’s totally unnecessary. The phone lines in your home or apartment are really just a big parallel circuit. If you plug the router into the phone jack in the wall instead of a phone, then you can plug phones into the other jacks around your place just as you normally would, and they’ll just work.
PLEASE NOTE if you try this that you *must* remove your home from the phone company’s network first. They occasionally run voltage through the lines to test them, and if you’re still connected to their network when they do, it can fry your router & such. Disconnecting is pretty easy. There’s a box on the side of your house that’s the line of demarcation between what you own and what Ma Bell does. Open it up, and there’s a bunch of RJ11 jacks. Unplug, and voila. Cake.
Vonage has more technical documents (also more informative and probably a little more helpful and accurate) on how to do this on their website. You just have to dig a little.
More recently, I’ve started getting a lot of phone calls from Vonage offering me extra little services. This is a very recent development, but a rather odious one. One of the things I’d always bragged on them for is that they did not harass me with upselling the way they traditional phone companies always had. Worse, their recordkeeping seems to be rather poor. They called me last week to offer me a second line for free for two months, and I declined. They called me again last night with the same offer. Grr.
Overall though, I’m thrilled with them and can’t recommend them enough.
26th June | Reply
I had a quick look at Vonage but they don’t have a service in Europe except in the UK, so that’s me buggered. Aside from the fixed monthly cost my only concern with them at present is their continuing bad news in the press (stock prices, insider trading allegations, etc.) and that gives me doubts about their long-term staying power. It maybe nothing but that worries me.
27th June | Reply
I’ve been finding all of those things rather troublesome myself, honestly. Hopefully they’ll turn things around, because they have a great product and I’d really like to see it hang around. We’ll see, I guess.