Has anyone heard of Vonage yet? You will see more and more commercials and pop-ups in the very near future. I am not a salesman at all, but just wanted to let everyone know, if you have cable modem and do not like to pay SBC those high phone bills, Vonage is for you.

Wow, I do sound like a salesman.

Anyway, I signed up for this and it has been great. Mostly because the $14.99 per month bill (with no additional costs). I get 500 minutes a month, which is plenty and it includes local, local-toll, and long distance in the US and Canada. Then they have a $24.99 per month plan for unlimited minutes.

If you are interested, send me your e-mail address and I will refer you and you will get 1 month free. Of course I would get 2 months.

You should check it out. www.vonage.com

Vonage offers VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service, which is increasingly available by a range of providers - including AT&T, for example. WideOpenWest is now offering the service (although they missed the memo that VOIP is supposed to be cheaper than traditional phone service). Comcast also offers it and I think that SBC may already have an offering. One thing to think about - a company like Vonage controls very little of the traffic. You use your existing broadband connection (can be DSL or cable modem) and your call travels just like any internet traffic. It does have to be switched onto the public telephone network to reach its destination, so Vonage does have to get it switched over, but they don't control the other pipes. Becuase of this, dealing with providers with some control over the pipe might actually yield better call quality. Cable companies are not too happy about providing a free pipe into the home that can be used by a competitor to offer service, without any payment to the cable company (or the phone company) so they are sort of secretly saying that they may beging to mess with traffic a little bit to create problems for the 'free riders' on their networks. These blips in the network would be undetectable if you were using the Internet, but would end your call if you were on the phone. At the same time, since they can control the pipe, they can code your voice traffic differently than regular data traffic and assign a higher priority to it. I'm sure Ted can probably correct the many mistakes I've made in this comment, but thought it was worth thinking about if you are interested in VOIP. I'm very interested in hearing about folks who have had the courage to jump over to VOIP around here.

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...I'm sure Ted can probably correct the many mistakes I've made...

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Not really... I make about three long-distance phone calls a year, so I haven't been paying much attention.

But those interested might want to bookmark DSL Reports (in general) and its Chicago Forum (in particular).

--TE

I've had Comcast digital phone service for a few years now. Works great and is quite a bit less expensive than SBC.

It's subject to all of the goofy telco taxes though so it's about $50 per month. Long-distance included. My phone bill hasn't been higher than $60 (taxes and surcharges included) in over two years.

With SBC? Routinely over $100 per month.

With a third-party outfit like Vonage, I'd be leery of those ultra-cheap early bills. Watch for rate creep. Plus, their theme music (if you can call it that!) on their TV spots has to be the most annoying crap I've heard since the height of the dot.com boom.

For long distance, I use a phone card that I got at Sam's Club. With a 2.96 cent rate with no connection fees, it's hard to beat. And you can refill the card over the phone.

Yes, I use pre-paid phone cards as well. Especially when traveling. Have you noticed now that most hotels charge you some outrageous fee just to use the phone? Even for "1-800" numbers? Typically, 50 cents per use.

Last month, I was in San Francisco and the hotel wouldn't even activate my phone for outgoing calls until I paid a "phone deposit" (unused portions refundable).

The problem with long-distance and my home phone is getting other members of my household to use a pre-paid card.

"Too many numbers," they whine.

Plus, places like Wheeling are considered "long-distance" now-a-days. What's up with that?

We sent 4 or 5 of those things to clients in Mexico City and Brazil. They seem to work great in Brazil...iffy in Mexico City. I can only imagine that they would be just fine in U.S. to U.S. applications.

Regarding "rate creep" by an outfit like Vonage. They have very few expenses, and so the margin they reap on the product is very high. A few months ago, AT&T reduced the price on its VOIP product by $5, matching Vonage's price. Vonage reduce its price a further $5 within a couple of hours. I was at a conference a week later and got a chance to listen to Vonage's CEO speak and he basically said he believed they would always be the low cost provider and would meet any price reduction - he was speaking to investors at this conference not customers, so he was probably telling the truth about his willingness to lower prices. The only rate creep I would expect would be if the FCC began to regulate the product and ordered Vonage to pay a fee to the broadband provider that gives them access to your home.

I have had Vonage for a while now and cannot even tell a difference between it and a land line. I think it is great. As far as the price of other providers, that seems very high for the same service. I only pay $14.99 a month without fees and taxes.

Also, I can see how the internet service provider can charge to have a phone hooked up because I am already paying them for their service. What I do with my internet is my business. Who knows what we will see in the future though.

One note: since moving to Vonage, I have a $400 first generation Tivo player that can no longer make the phone call to download the TV listings and menus. So instead I will be using WOWs DVR which does not require a phone line. All the information goes through coax. Also, it is only costing me an extra 5 cents a month. That is after I cancel my Tivo subscription (that is, if I can ever get through to a operator to cancel it).

Overall I am very happy with the quality of the phone, but most of all, I am happy with the price.

No vonage for me. I had problems with there service in the past. I will stick with SBC Phone and wait for SBC to offer VOIP in the future when they bring fiber to the home.

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Originally posted by BrotherJPW:
No vonage for me. I had problems with there service in the past. I will stick with SBC Phone and wait for SBC to offer VOIP in the future when they bring fiber to the home.

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I guess you're content with waiting a long long time then!

I've been using Vonage for about 2 years and have all good things to say about it. FYI, you will have to dial the area code for every call you make, much like when you use your cell phone.

It's been my experience that when people have problems with VoIP, it's due to poor internet connections. By just browsing on the internet, you don't notice quality issues as much, but the VoIP is more sensitive to a poor connection. In the beginning, I had to have WOW come out a few times to get mine tuned correctly and since having that done it's been smooth sailing.

The quality decrease is almost impercptable, and is significantly better than cell phones which everyone seems to tolerate.

They include pretty much ever feature you want on a phone; voice mail, call forward, caller ID, and all the other popular ones. Additionally, you can pick your area code so that if you have a large family in say Virginia, you could either have your primay phone number with a virinia area code or get an additional virtual phone number that rings to the same phone for $5. My package costs $25 for unlimited calls in the US/Canada. I've made several calls to Italy, Australia, and Singapore, again with great quality, and prices have typically been about 3 cents per minute making telephone communication a complete non issue financially. Calling Chicago used to cost me more than that when I had SBC.

Here's a my last bill which I've cut/pasted from Vonage's online account management system so you can get an idea of true cost. This only shows the summary, but they have details online showing both outgoing as well as incoming calls. Since signing up, I've never had a phone bill over $30.

International Calls for 1-(630)-xxx-xxxx
(20/Dec-19/Jan) $0.60
Premium Unlimited Plan for 1-(630)-xxx-xxxx (20/Jan-19/Feb) $24.99
FET Tax $0.77
Regulatory Recovery Fee $1.50
Total Amount $27.86

I could go on and on with additional benefits, but one last thing worth mentioning which for legal reason, nobody including me will recommend doing, but I'll mention what I did since this is a technology forum. I dropped SBC, and to make sure there was no current coming into my house, unplugged the telephone wire at the entrance so that I wouldn't risk sending the low telephone voltage into my Vonage ATA device. Then instead of plugging a telephone into the Vonage ATA adapater, I ran a phone wire from the adapter to the phone jack in the house. Thus, the whole house was wired for Vonage.

For what its worth, I don't think you need to wait for SBC to run fiber to your home. You just need a broadband internet connection - and in the case of the phone company, that is DSL, which does not require fiber to your home. Their acquisition of AT&T won't close until 2006, but you may see a bit more of a push on VOIP from SBC now that they are acquiring AT&T, as AT&T was planning an reinvigorated push into VOIP this year.

SBC's current fiber build strategy, by the way, is to build to the "node" rather than all the way to your house. They will only build out 18 million homes and it will take the next 3 years to do it - I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty sure we would be in the type of area to be attractive enough to get into that 18 million (being a part of a large metropolitan area and having the demographics to support demand for several services). At that pont they will offer video service (they will begin commercial roll-outs of some video services in some areas as early as the first half of this year). I've seen a couple of demos of the video service and its pretty neat. Television over IP offers some interesting functionality - and also has the potential to really expand time-shifting and video on demand.

One issue to watch out for with VOIP over DSL is the fact that DSL is asymmetric. I have SBC's DSL service and tried out VOIP last year. It worked well, except in two situations. One was when my kids were playing web-based games that apparently used up a lot of bandwidth. The other was in conference calls for work where I was sharing my computer's screen with colleagues. In those two cases, I was receiving good quality speech, but the folks on the other end couldn't understand me. At the time, I was using the 384 kbps downlink / 128 kbps uplink service (I think they call it "Express" now), and 128 kbps just wasn't enough bandwidth when there was a lot of other traffic going up the link with no quality of service scheme in place. Given that I never had trouble with the downlink, even when I was getting frequent updates of colleagues' screens, I'd guess that the DSL "Pro" service with 1.5 Mbps downlink and 384 kbps uplink might not have that problem. I switched to the "Pro" service a couple months ago, but haven't gotten around to trying it again.

I was using Free World Dialup with a standalone SIP phone from Grandstream, so my setup wasn't the same as with Vonage. However, a co-worker has Vonage over DSL at the lower rate speeds, and we can't understand her on conference calls when she's on the call at home over Vonage and sharing her computer screen with us...

Question on the taxes and fees...BytheNumbers stated that taxes and fees ran to about $50. In Art's cut and paste, it looked more like $2 and change.

Can anyone clarify this? And if I were to use Vonage for 2 lines would my taxes and fees double? EEK...if so, I am staying with ATT!!

That is it. There are really no other fees except what he has listed. I am even on the $14.99 plan which gives me 500 minutes local and long distance.

As far as the extra line, it would be double, but you can also setup a virtual number for $4.99 per month. The purpose of the virtual number would be, say you have family in Arizona, you can setup a virtual phone with Arizona's area code. That way your family can call you, but only be charged a local call.

Great idea on the virtual number, but I need an actual number to connect to a fax line.

Has anyone heard if Wideopenwest is going to be offering VOip? Any word on their service or rate plans?

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Originally posted by Fischermom:
Great idea on the virtual number, but I need an actual number to connect to a fax line.

"Vonage Residential Customers Can Get a Dedicated Fax Line for Only $9.99 Per Month
Less than a separate fax line from your old phone company, a Vonage fax line is only $9.99 per month with a one-time $9.99 activation fee. You get 250 minutes of local and long distance outgoing fax service plus unlimited incoming faxes each month. Extra local and long distance outgoing fax minutes are only 3.9 cents per minute. Outgoing international faxes are billed at our low international rates.

It's Easy to Use
Just add a Vonage fax line and then plug your fax machine into Line 2 of the Phone Adapter, and you can begin sending and receiving faxes. Vonage fax works with all brands of fax machines.

Get a Complete Record of Your Faxes Online
Since your dedicated fax line has its own number, it's easy to keep track of your incoming and outgoing faxes on your Vonage dashboard. This allows you to check your fax activity online, anytime, anywhere."


I just connected my Vonage service yesterday.... it is AWESOME. My sound clarity is actually better then my old SBC phone line ever was. And the features that Vonage gives for the $ are great.

I'm confusulated...

My broadband connection to the Internet is DSL, piggybacked on my old-fashioned, traditional phone line.

I'd be delighted to switch to Vonage... but it appears that I'd have to cancel my POTS phone line to switch... which would leave me without DSL... and thus no way of connecting to Vonage. Catch 22.

What am I missing?

--TE

Why not just make all your long distance calls from your cell phone? Aren't they included in all packages these days?

Better yet...make them all from work.

Or is this for local calls?