Ask the friends list: Vonage?

[geekchick]

I'm kinda tired of paying Verizon $60 a month for a service I hardly use. I'd gladly drop the landline altogether if cell reception in my house was good enough to do it, which sadly it isn't for either of us (Cingular and T-Mobile). Any of y'all have Vonage and an opinion you'd like to share with me about it?

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

Our cell reception sucks, too. But we like to keep a landline -- not only landline, but a corded phone -- because we want to be able to use our phone if the power goes out, and to call 911 and have them know where we are.

[geekchick]

So long as I step outside the house, my cell reception is actually fine, it's just inside the house that it's not good enough to rely on as an only phone line. With Vonage, it seems that you give them your phone number and address, and that gets sent with your 911 call.

We were also looking at Verizon's FiOS service, but it looks like that wouldn't save us enough money to be worth the hassle of switching everything over.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

I have Vonage; it runs me about $30 a month, making it $60 total for the landline I keep for emergencies, my DSL and the Vonage. I've never had a problem with the service. Their billing got messed up last month, but they fixed it happily. I'd highly recommend them.

[dmk.livejournal.com]

(I'm here via dglenn's Friends list.) Vonage is great, and if you use the "Refer-a-Friend" feature, the person currently on Vonage gets two months free service, and the new customer gets one month (which is why I'm replying through mathilde's reply). Ask your friend to send you an e-mail through Vonage's Dashboard. (I've never seen any signs of them selling the addresses.) I use the ~$20/month plan (after taxes), since it includes ~500 minutes. Check the Vonage site to see all the wonderful features.

[geekchick]

Excellent, thanks for the recommendation!

[penguinet.livejournal.com]

I forget that Chris is on T-mobile and free for me. Well, he's a free call. Uhm...you know what I mean. Anyway, I wonder if I'm free for him too. (Follow that last progression backwards.)

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

I forget that Chris is on T-mobile and free for me.

I'll file that under Things I Did Not Know, or perhaps Things I Need To Take More Advantage Of.

[penguinet.livejournal.com]

*beam*

[geekchick]

Uhm...you know what I mean.

Hee!

[datagoddess.livejournal.com]

We have Vonage, and like it. The only time we've had issues is when I've been Bittorrenting a bunch of stuff down the phone quality sucked, but all I do is pause the torrents when the phone rings.

[geekchick]

That makes sense. Our connection is generally okay, but that's mostly because I haven't set up port forwarding for bittorrent yet. ;)

[grum]

I have a verizon landline at their bare-minimumest. Incoming calls are free, outgoing calls cost a dime (and I never make any). It's under $20 a month. I don't quite think it would cover the needs you wanted it to, but it's another option.
I wanted to have a land line for 911, and a local number to give to employer types. So it's working pretty well.

[geekchick]

Vonage will apparently let us keep our existing number, so there's something. When I signed up for landline service, they made it very, very hard to find any plans under $30/month. Thanks for mentioning it though, because now when I look I can find a few bare-minimum flat-rate sorts of plans.

[blivious.livejournal.com]

L and I have been using them for 3 years and have never had a significant problem. The bigger question is probably how happy you are with your ISP, since that becomes the critical path.

[geekchick]

Yeah, the real question is how stable our cable modem service is going to be. Cox keeps pushing us to "upgrade" to digital cable and phone service through them, but my suspicion is that they want us to do that so that we can't call them when the cable is out. =)

[fangorn.livejournal.com]

(I'm here via fimbrethil)

In troubleshooting Vonage phone service, I find that most issues are network/internet issues. Examples: customer has much less available upload or download bandwidth than they thought they had; cable modem is an older model which can't handle streams of data well; customer has a firewall which is blocking a needed UDP port; customer is mistakenly using a switch or hub(!) in place of a router.

Most issues can be resolved.

I'm also a customer. The flat rate billing is good for lengthy long distance calls. The sound quality is adequte, but I'm not enthusiastic about the way land lines or cell phones sound, either.

[geekchick]

Thanks! I think the biggest issue is going to be how stable our cable modem connection is or is not, since I haven't yet heard any real complaints about the service itself.