Anyone try this thing? Feedback much apreciated. Sounds like a great idea to me, but I remain a bit skeptical.
Thanks for the info inadvance
i asked here a couple weeks ago about both Vonage and Skype and got no response.
after digging around a bit more, went with Vonage. i’m a month into it and am very impressed. $14.99 for 500 minutes residential service. rarely will i use the home phone for 8 hours in a month. only issue is you must have a broadband connection. i haven’t found out yet if you can do it through Direct TV or Dish Network.
the bells and whistles are impressive, especially the voice mail. when a message is left for me on the home phone, the system emails a notice to me with the message as a .wav file attachment.
i also sent you a separate referral message which will get you a credit if you sign up.
I’ve had Vonage for quite a while. As advertised lots of features for a great price. I’m very satisfied.
I think the quality of your broadband connection has a lot do with how satisfied you are. I have RoadRunner and for me it is very reliable and very fast, so no problems. I also have Directv with 3 DirecTivos (2 Sony SAT60’s and 1 R10) and have no problems. Others I know have had some problems with them dialing.
It did take over 3 months for them to transfer my number from Sprint. But, I called and got them to credit my account for the time I was not actually using it.
Be SURE to check out the 911 support. One of the nightly news programs did a story about how horrible the 911 support was since it’s not regulated the same as land or cell lines. You may still need to keep a cell line handy for such situations. Examples included calls that went unanswered, misrouted (by states), and the fact that no personal info comes up to the 911 dispatcher the way it does for your house and cell.
Not to mention that if you lose house power, you lose phone service (unlike POTS).
I must have been away when you posted that question.
I’ve been using 3 different voip services for a year now. Free world dialup, nikotel and skype.
Free world dialup is, as it says, free voip, that works computer to computer. Nikotel is a service that works computer to regular phone, at very reduced rate. I have a neat little box that plugs into my router and allows me to use a regular phone for each of the two lines. This way people can phone me and my phone will ring. The reason I use two services is that not everyone I know is on broadband or leaves their computer on all the time.
I use free world dialup for those that also use it, but I can use nikotel to phone any telephone number around the world very cheaply. For example, here in Brunei it’s very expensive to phone back to the UK, but with nikotel it costs just 2.5c (US) a minute. Bargain.
Also, free world diallup have access numbers around the world that allow you to dial in. For example, in the UK there is a local rate number you can call then, once it connectes, you enter the FWD number you wish to call and it connects you. this means that people in the UK can call us here in brunei for the cost of a local rate uk call. Very neat.
I’ve been using skype lately with a couple of friends and that’s working very well, and I’m now investigating videoconferencing too.
You can take my broadband connection from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers, even if it is only 385kb and costs a fortune here. It’s still much cheaper than the phone bill would be.
hope this helps,
J.
Works great when it works but boy when it doesn’t, you’re screwed! I’ve been happy but experience delays, bad routers, and bad service. BUT, that is all behind me and I have 5 lines coming into my home office and run my DSL through it as well.
Bad part is when elec. goes out, I’m done!
I would tell you to try it, the costs are great and they are improving things every day.
I work for a little startup building telephone equipment (the back office type stuff that makes your calls work). We put together a voip solution for companies like vonage and skype. There are several things to consider.
(For the following, never means not within 5-10 years)
-
You will never get the reliability of a land line.
-
You will never get the consistent quality of a land line.
-
You will rarely get the capacity on the network as in a land line. i.e. you will get more “please try your call again later” except with voip you may or may not get an explanatory message. OTOH, on a land line there is no guarantee that the explanatory message will make any sense.
-
As other posters have said, this is not a lifeline service. On your land line, when you call 911 it is not technically possible for you to hang up. The 911 operator seizes your phone and they own it until they release it. This is impossible with voip. 911 will also not get your name, address or any information. There is no guarantee that you will even reach 911. Finally, when you lose electrical power or your ISP connection, you lose the phone. It should be extremely rare that you lose land line service.
On the positive side
-
Cheap. We help run a voip phone network that serves other phone companies. They sell their rates for a couple cents cheaper per minute than land lines and they still make 2-3 cents per minute profit. This is enormous for the phone business, many people out there are trying to make fractions of pennies per minute.
-
Eventually you will get some neat features as providers work out the phone/computer interaction.
I’ve been on Vonage for two months now, and have been very pleased. Call quality is fine, it’s a heck of a lot cheaper then traditional service, even if you opt for the unlimited plan. All of the bells and whistles that you would typically pay extra for (voicemail, caller id, call forwarding, call waiting, etc…) are rolled into the base price. If you like the features, there’s no way traditional service can compete on price.
911 - Vonage offers what amounts to a registration service. You tell them where you live, they figure out what call station you should be routed to if you dial 911. I don’t know anything about the information the 911 operator gets on you, nor was I even aware the typically 911 takes control of the line in a conventional set-up. In any event - Vonage supports 911 at least to some degree. Some other VOIP providers do this also, some don’t. I don’t expect to ever need to call 911, but I wouldn’t have gone to VOIP if it wasn’t an option.
Power outage - Yep, you’ll lose your land line in a power outage. Vonage has a feature however that will forward incoming calls to an alternate number (your cell phone, presumably) if your land line is unreachable. Obviously not a fail-safe, but a nice back-up plan if you get decent cell coverage in your house.
To me the decision hinges on the cost/benefit trade-offs involving how much reliability and emergency safety you feel you need. The only reason I didn’t ditch the land line altogether was the hassle of conveying a new phone number to the trillion vendors/family members who might have a legitimate reason to call me. My wife and I usually use our cell phones at home anyway, so the ‘lose your phone in a power outage’ issue just wasn’t that big to me (not to mention the scarcity of power outages in southern CA).
Good luck!
-reliability compared to land line so far is equal
-no one has been able to tell the difference in quality
-no intercepts yet
-Vonage does offer 911 support provided you take a moment to enter your specific data in the proper account management fields. and Vonage offers a feature whereby you designate a secondary phone or line should the connection drop, which i just have sent over to my cell.
i’m not a Vonage salesperson by any means but you will never-ever get me to return to paying $40-50 a month for a home phone as long as i have a broadband connection.
I looked into this about six months ago and ended up choosing to go with Lingo because it was slightly cheaper ($19.99 unlimited minutes) and offered free calls to Western Europe, which I thought was really cool.
I haven’t had any problems with the service. I have a cable internet connection.
I like the perks that come with VOIP in general, i.e. you can choose which area code you want, and even pay extra for more than one, your voice message can be sent to your email, call forwarding, 3-way calling, etc. for free.
If you’re interested in calling people in Europe for free, I’d go with Lingo, otherwise just take your pick.
(PS: I can send you an invite for a free month, just like the other services)
911 may or may not be an issue for some people. Keep in mind that a cell phone is not a life line either. If you are an 80 year old woman living by herself, this could be an issue.
I wouldn’t trust anyone’s promise that if you enter your info that they will forward it to the 911 call center. I have no inside info on Vonage specifically, however, as a programmer who makes these things work I’ll bet that it rarely works in real life. I wouldn’t bet even money that any specific 911 call reaches the correct 911 call center. It is a tough thing to do when your customer is not locked down by a specifc wire pair and you are serving customers all over the world.
One thing to look for in the next couple of years is the meging of cell, broadband, computer and land line phones. As more switches like what we sell get out into the market, then there is no reason that you can’t seamlessly merge everything into one. The big bells can’t do it right now because of legacy hardware, but there competitors are gaining steam and things should get much better for the consumer over the next couple years. I don’t think that prices will drop much though features will go through the roof.
My experience with Vonage started out great but ended terribly. Signed up and got my route and hooked it up with no problems… for 1 day. The next day outgoing calls would not work and eventually I got no dialtone. My landline was still hooked up so I called their ‘support’ line. I use the term loosely because after you make it though the endless options I was put on hold for a long time… usually 15+ minutes.
After spending a Saturday morning with the technician for a couple of hours of no progress I realized it is simply not worth having to debug my home phone. It took me literally 1 more hour to cancel my service.
My recommendation is to wait a few more years. Let them get the kinks out.
“It took me literally 1 more hour to cancel my service.”
I thought up a torture for phone company execs:
Put them in a room for at least a full day with no food or water, maybe longer.
Devise a system where they have to navigate their own company’s voice mail system in order to get food or water. Each time they pick a wrong option or have to wait any longer than 2 minutes…
“I’m sorry, we did not recognize that request…”
Starve, mofo…