Vonage?

[SirMoby]

Any Americans use Vonage? I'm thinking about trying it for a couple of months because I'm just tired of looking at a standard phone bill filled with 3 pages of extra charges.

I know Ramster uses it and the sound quality seems fine. I also understand that when cable goes down so does my phone but we have mobiles for that.

Are there a bunch of extra charges?

You happy with it?

[Jim]

I use vonage. When the phone goes down, you can have it setup to redirect to a cell phone if you wish. Also, the features are really cool. I have mine setup so both my office phone rings and my cell phone rings at the same time. The call goes to whichever phone I answer. The voicemail emails you telling you who left you the voicemail and you can either listen to it online or on the phone. I am happy that I switched.

[SirMoby]

Is it really a flat rate or do they nickle and dime you to death like the phone companies?

[cd34]

I have two of them and just got off the phone with a guy in Canada. AT&T would have charged me .25/minute for that call because I refuse to pay their $6/month international plan. With Vonage, it is considered minutes against my plan. Call quality is generally very good. If you have a router, like the netgear router, consider putting it on a port and using netgear's quality of service to guarantee that port be preferred over other traffic. That way, when you are making calls and surfing, you don't sound like darth vader to the other party.

I love it, but don't think to use it as much as I should. Works well and is very consistent. Oddly, my AT&T long distance had a problem the other day dialing an 800# with an all circuits busy message. My vonage line got me right through twice.

If you do a lot of long distance, I would recommend it. They have an 800# option that is dirt cheap as well. You can also get virtual numbers with it so that you can have a NYC number at your house in Georgia. That way, if you have family in NYC, they can call you on your NYC number and not have to pay long distance charges. Your calls to them of course just count as 'minutes' off your plan -- or if you have the unlimited plan, who cares. haha

As for calling features, they have voice mail which you can listen to on their dashboard -- or have the message emailed to you. They have call forwardng, call hunting, and some other mode that basically allows you to ring up to 6 phones simultaneously and whichever one picks up gets the call. Jim can probably tell you how well he likes that.

So, they call your vonage number, it rings your vonage phone, your landline, your cell phone -- and whichever one you decide to answer gets the call.

Overall, its a pretty decent package. I have the $19.95 500 minute plan and really don't use it as much as I should. Their unlimited plan for $25 is quite a deal. Their international rates are very good. Not really much of a reason not to get one if you make a lot of long distance calls.

If you don't like the cable vs landline, you might check with your long distance carrier to see if they have any unlimited long distance plans. Definitely not going to be in the same price bracket, but, perhaps would make your long distance bills more palatable.

And unlike my local service phone bill, the price they quote is the price you pay + taxes added on. My bill has been the same since I have gotten both vonage devices.

[juggernaut]

I use Vonage. Great service. Jim is correct if the power or internet goes down in the house. If you dont have it set to forward you are at a lose of phone. I never paid anything more then they said I would. Phone service can be choppy one a month or so but its not anything crazy. I hear some echo once in a blue moon also. We use it to call Romania and its like $0.15 per min and that is a blessing from our old 1k a month phone bill from Verizon. I also have my fax running threw my nat router and have not had any issues at all with it. The thing with the phone companies is they charge you all these government charges IE FCC tax, line tax, user tax, tax on tax, tax to tax the tax lol. Anyway great service. One other nice thing. you can pull the little box they give you and go anyplace in the world, if you have internet you have phone with your number. Also have any friends you dont want calling, tell them to give you a out of state area code and your friends now get charged long distance to call you but you dont pay a dime to call them. I also found I never ever get sales calls on the phone now. Anyway great service if you can read my babble. jugg

[MrYum]

Thanks for the info folks!

I've been thinking about dumping my land line...$80/month is stupid for phone service.

Think it's time to check out Vonage

[glowlite]

My experience w/Vonage has been great. I've used it since July. VERY simple installation. No sneaky "add on" or "hidden" charges. My bill (including an add-on 800#) is $33.88 per month. Inbound for the 800# is 4.9 per minute after the 1st 100 minutes.

[SirMoby]

OK, so that's 4 I guess I'll go ahead and place an order now. I did notice that thier international rates are similar to those offered by phone cards.

[kenny]

Originally Posted by glowlite

My experience w/Vonage has been great. I've used it since July. VERY simple installation. No sneaky "add on" or "hidden" charges. My bill (including an add-on 800#) is $33.88 per month. Inbound for the 800# is 4.9 per minute after the 1st 100 minutes.

I have the exact same deal you got except I have a 1-877 number

[gobgook2]

We just signed up, waiting for the equipment to arrive I'll try to remember to post back when we get set up...

I think they need to make it a little clearer on their site/ads on the topic of "Unlimited Calls to Anywhere". Further in the site (the help section, actually!) they say only:

Incoming calls are not counted against your minutes on any Vonage rate plan. No fees are applied for outbound toll free, Vonage to Vonage, and incoming calls.

That lead me to wonder if we'd be getting nickelled and dimed to death on outbound calls to anything OTHER THAN other Vonage customers. After talking with some friends who have it, that's apparently not the case... But after working for Verizon Wireless as a sales rep, I know how those bastards hide shit in the fine print and nail you 3 months later

Anyway, we shut down our landline phone service LONG ago, in favor of cell phones only, since the wife and I didn't spend much time at home anyway. But now that I'm back to being the house bitch, lowering the cell plan to the minimum and setting up vonage cuts our phone expense in half from $200/mo to ~$95/mo. Sounds like a good deal to me

More to report when I know more

[Jim]

Originally Posted by gobgook2

We just signed up, waiting for the equipment to arrive I'll try to remember to post back when we get set up...

I think they need to make it a little clearer on their site/ads on the topic of "Unlimited Calls to Anywhere". Further in the site (the help section, actually!) they say only:



That lead me to wonder if we'd be getting nickelled and dimed to death on outbound calls to anything OTHER THAN other Vonage customers. After talking with some friends who have it, that's apparently not the case... But after working for Verizon Wireless as a sales rep, I know how those bastards hide shit in the fine print and nail you 3 months later

Anyway, we shut down our landline phone service LONG ago, in favor of cell phones only, since the wife and I didn't spend much time at home anyway. But now that I'm back to being the house bitch, lowering the cell plan to the minimum and setting up vonage cuts our phone expense in half from $200/mo to ~$95/mo. Sounds like a good deal to me

More to report when I know more

I also ordered the 800 number and a fax line. I have yet to pay more than the amount quoted.

[dareutwo]

We have it here so the 2 boys that live with me can talk to their brothers for basically nothing.
(since you can choose your phone number, I picked one in the Twin Cities Metro area where they live)
It's normally just them talking, so we only got the 14.99 plan. (plus tax) that's all I've ever been billed. All the calls go through and sound fine.
Not exactly sure how many minutes per day that plan is, (like 15 per day) but it's just them calling and it can be days between calls, so a Wed. 1 hour call hasn't mattered.
When installing I had some router config issues, but it was in the FAQ's, didn't even need to call anyone.
I would recommend them in a heartbeat.

[gobgook2]

Well, hang on tight...

Got our equipment in the mail the other day, and other than the pain in the ass of having to hook a machine directly to it to accesss 192.168.15.1, the setup was relatively simple. For the sake of reference, it's added just like a system on my network. The WAP, 4 machines, and now the vonage base unit feed into an 8 port switch which feeds into the router. So we start using it right off, and it's hit and miss on quality. So I move the base unit as far away from the wireless AP as possible - not much change. There's typically a HORRID lag, and 3/5 calls the person on the other end of the call says my audio is choppy as hell. So, I'm afraid my proverbial "pipe" is likely full, and will probably have to find a new home for my servers. Best to start a thread in the right forum, but i'll be asking for colo spam soon. I like having the machines right here in front of me at all times, in case of trouble (even though it means paying commercial cable rates to be able to use SMTP ports without violating their AUP) but if the network traffic here is just way too heavy to allow Vonage to work well... well then I guess I have to do *something*...

On a side note, i went digging around vonage-forums.com and found it was like 500 pages of problem after complaint after problem I did run some tests and found a few AT&T routers in the stream (I'm on InsightBB) that were pretty damn lossy. So, in the end, I don't even know if moving the servers into colo will do much to solve the shitty audio problems or not!

Rambling already... I'll stop hehe, thanks for the vent...

GobGook

[selena]

I've really, really been thinking about switching to Vonage. I'm pretty hardware stupid though, and am hesitant on the whole hookup thing. Right now I have a netgear router running into my broadband modem. Soon I will also have a wireless netgear router running into it. Not sure where it is I'd hook it up.

But the replies here sure make me think more about it.

[Jim]

Selena
You hook up the vonage router to your other router and then plug in the phone. Really easy...

[Fetishlady]

i've got a vonage phone in my apartment and i only pay a flat rate.
quite cheap too.

Btw, thanks for using my handle Jim and cd34 - it's not funny though.

[cd34]

selena,

I use a linksys router which allows me to set Quality of Service (QOS) for one port. I put the vonage device on one port, set the priority on that built in port to high and haven't had a problem since.

gobgook2,

Depending on your router, same issues as selena. You might try to enable quality of service settings to prefer your voip traffic. AT&T does offer their own VOIP service 'Callvantage', however, like Vonage, Internap provides the bandwidth for it. If your link is busy, you can reduce your MTU on your router and get better voip performance in exchange for slightly slower large downloads.

[gobgook2]

Nope, no QOS setting ability Figures! lol Oh well, maybe I'll try the MTU trick later on... I also ran the tests (multiple times) at testyourvoip.com and came up with and average of 3.0-3.5 / 5 with maybe 1 in 20 tests scoring 1.0 or less!!!! When I checked my results against other InsightBB users, they don't seem to be having much more luck than I. I've almost sold myself on the trouble being on route, at a downstream device, not at my network or point of entry (having shut down both servers AND closed off all applicable ports on the router...). Well, that eases my frustration a little anyway, whether it's realistic or not! LOL

I was going to attach a shot or two of the graph from testyourvoip.com's tracert test call from here (IL) to Boston but they vary pretty widely... If anyone wants to see any of those reports, I'd be more than happy to share, just hit me up... The insight and at&t hops are responding quicker in this test than the last test I did... but still reporting like a 45% packet loss!?!?!?!

[AcidMaX]

Been using it for a while, and it works great. My wife is on the phone for a couple hours a day and I have the flat rate, unlimited plan. Thank god for that or my phone bill would be easily $300 a month. Now its only $30 a month

[smutranger]

We have vonage and I love it. It passed the wife test and everything. I hooked it up and wired it into the source telephone lines in the house so every phone jack is a live vonage jack. Just plug in a phone and go.

Flat fee, lots of features, works great for business at home folks.

[Cleo]

Phone company has once again pissed me off. Now they are billing me $80 for fixing my phone last month despite the fact that they hooked two lines to my house at the same time and people calling me were getting a fax machine that I don't have.

Plus I'm sick of paying close to $90 per month for one basic phone line since the only way to keep my existing number is to continue paying business rates for what is nothing more then my personal number.

Waiting for my cable modem to be working again and I'm going to order Voyage. I'm told that it should be fixed by Friday.

I'm going to transfer my existing number to Vonage which is going to kill the line that my ADSL is on.

I'm then going to order the cheapest land line that our phone company offers for my backup ADSL plus my house alarm needs a land line. I'm not even going to plug a phone into this line.

I guess I'll have both ADSL and a cable modem I can place the Vonage phone adapter on the ADSL for best quality since the ADSL is only used if my cable modem goes down.

I see Vonage has this phone adapter for free.
http://www.vonage.com/device.php?type=RTP300
I assume that I can just hook my existing phone network into its phone jack.

[juggernaut]

Cleo just a note on this for you. I have the service and you may find that, when you are uploading files etc that the calls either get choppy or echos. Everyone once in a blue moon my calls drop. Also when people call me from cell phones they say the connection is shitty but I think it's their cell service. My bro claims NO but when I go into his house I get like 1 bar on my cell so I know he's talking out his ass. Anyway well worth the money compaired to the quality. I'll take some drop calls and shitty sound for the $30 or so a month. I also found when I was trying to transfer my number after 30 days they said it could not be done, but screw it left the landline on for 1 month with a direct to new number service.

[Jim]

I still have not had a problem with Vonage. I even hooked it up to a phone jack in the house and unhooked the connection to the phone company and all the phone jacks now work like normal.

[Jim]

The only thing that I don't like is the call waiting. After the first beep of call waiting, I have about 3 seconds of silence. But there are just so many cool online features that with just the call waiting sucking, I really don't care about it.

I have it setup now so my actual voice mail is emailed to me as a wav file. It is also setup so if my phone rings for 15 seconds without me answering it, it goes to my cell phone...5 more seconds and it goes to my vonage voice mail.

[Jim]

And, although I have yet to figure out why I would ever do this, you can take the box and a phone with you anyplace. If there is a High Speed Network connection, you have your house phone with you.