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3/3/2013 Update: No complaints about services. Still missing a feature or two and the price is increasing a bit, but still a great value and service I'm happy to pay for. 1/12/2011 Update: Service continues to be excellent once again. No issues, and features, price and reliability, are one of the best buys in the business. Only wish they would get that app for CDMA smart phones. 3/4/2010 Update: Vonage service continues to be excellent. No issues or problems to report, the service still works quite well. Currently, two Vonage voice lines and 1 fax line all working with no problems. Family members enjoy the features and calling plans [to other countries] so everyone loves it. A+. The price above ($33) is for one line. 1/14/2009 Update: ------------------------- Still fantastic service and call quality. There are no issues to report, no changes in service or expectations. Price remains at a great point, and Vonage, for me, is an excellent VoIP service that works well for me with no problems. Only thing is that I would like to change my outgoing name for the caller ID from "unknown name" to my name, and I'm sure there is a way to do that, but I just haven't even researched it. That would be my only "complaint", but it's not really a fair one since I haven't even researched how to fix it yet. Anyway, continued great service from Vonage. Would recommend them highly. 5/11/2008 Update: -------------------------- Still fantastic service. No issues, call clarity still fantastic. Features still amazing. No way I'd give up Vonage. I had to call my parents in several cities in Australia in March of 2008, and it cost less than $1 extra to talk to them for 45 minutes. You can't beat that! A+++ Service. 10/15/2007 Update: ---------------------------- It's been a little over 6 months since my last review, and nothing much to say other than that quality is as good or better as before. In addition, new features were rolled out this summer as well as world-calling plans. Service and price remain outstanding, and I love what Vonage provides. We still have 3 lines (2 voice, 1 fax) here and all working fine. Vonage and Sprint recently settled, which is good news. Litagtion with Verizon is still on-going, and no one really knows how that will pan out. The only negative that I can find is that tech support is not the best---I often find an answer to my technical question at third-party websites, and not Vonage's. Little tricks here and there if a hiccup occurs in the service, for example. I plan on keeping Vonage - the service and is just too good, and the price is too perfect for me to go anywhere else. --- April 7th, 2007 update --- Vonage continues to be great for our phone system. We have 3 Vonage lines, 2 regular and 1 fax that work perfectly. Call quality remains excellent, as do the features. Since my last update, they have offered free International calling to select European countries the customer subscribes to their highest unlimited package, which we do. The recent court trouble with Vonage will hopefully turn out in Vonage's favor in the end, as we'd hate to lose our Vonage access given the unparralleled quality, features, and price. That being said, BBR has been an invaluable source of help for me on the occasional time Vonage has gone down (3-4 times per year, totalling perhaps 24 hrs per year). Not "five nines" for reliability, but darn good, and well worth the price. 24 hrs / day = 8544 hrs/year. 24 hrs downtime per year (approx) = 8520 hours uptime per year out of 8544. =99.719% uptime. 9/15/06 Update: ---------------- I wanted to do a Q6 month update, but that didn't happen. So here I am. Vonage, aside from a small handful (greater-than-1-less-than-5) of issues that each of which lasted less than 24 hours since my last update, I continue to give Vonage high marks. In terms of a grading scale, I'll give them an A-. Price has gone up slightly (taxes?), and quality has remained constant--generally very, very good. All the perks - voice mail, call forwarding, etc. have been a great addition to our lives here. As mentioned above, we picked up a 2nd voice line and a fax line, and they too have been very good. The only downside at this point (that I see) is technical support. I'm actually going to lower my rating on them to a 2 (from a 3) because of a recent issue. Apparently, in a recent firmware push to our ATA's (Motorolla V1005), one of them was successfull and one was not. For the life of me, I coudn't figure out why it was happening or how to fix it. Luckily, I wasn't the only person having the problem. In the Vonage forum here on BBR, user's described my exact situation, and collabratively, we were able to fix it. Apparently, one of the people in the discussion called Vonage Tech Support and they were unable to fix the problem. The user in question then came to the Vonage forum and after some experimentation, was able to get his ATA back working after a series of moderately difficult steps. I find it fortunate that I can continuously come to a place like BBR for help, but I find it troubling that Vonage can't help people in some instances. Granted, much of Vonage's complaints from customers are out of their control, but this was in their control, and I had to come to BBR to get it fixed, not Vonage.com. For this, I'm lowering my rating of their tech support, but I continue to highly recommend Vonage as a low-cost alternative to high-cost POTS lines, where people also have a reliable, low-latency, high bandwith connection. --12/09/05 Update --- It's been a while since I made an update to this, so I figured now was a good time to do so. After 1.5 years of Vonage service with one Vonage line, and about a year with the second line, we have had hardly any problems. The only "Vonage-specific" problems we have had are: 1) Occasionally, our VM indicator light stays on. A reboot of our Motorolla ATA usually solves that problem. 2) "All circuits are busy" happens a few times a month, but upon hanging up and redialing the # that generated that error, the call goes through. We used to have Cablevision's Optimum Online as our ISP, but we now we have Verizon FiOS and have had Fios since May of 2005. Since Fios, there has been zero (I really mean zero) problems with voice or call quality -- when we had Optimum, occasionally there would be some echoing or stuttering, but again, that was relatively rare. We just purchased a 3rd line from Vonage (dedicated fax line for $9.99 month), and that too has been great. Three phone lines in the house now - all Vonage -- 2 voice, 1 fax. Total bill for all 3 comes to less than $70 per month, which was the cost of our old POTS line including all the taxes, fees, and the moderate long distance calls we made. Now, our bill is always the same, quality and features are better, and with Fios, no latency so voice quality is exceptional. Big thumbs up for Vonage. Note: Since the parents have become more accustomed to the "perks" with Vonage, they have said to me they don't know how they could live without the "free" features Vonage offers compared to our old POTS; Voicemail, call waiting, and especially, call forwarding. After deciding that paying MCI $75/month for local and long distance was too much, we checked out Vonage in May of 2004. Setup was a little confusing, and only because of the limitation of the Motorolla ATA. Apparently, this device can be used either in front of or behind the router. By default, the device is setup to work in front of the router. However, this device is a poor NAT device, and based upon the comments and suggestions found here at BBR, the decision was made to change the settings on my ATA so that it could just be plugged into a switch. Before I did this, the ATA would lockup a lot. But, after putting the device after the router (and into a switch), the connections have been rock solid. The advantage of putting the ATA behind the router is stability. The disadvantage is that the ATA's internal QoS is disabled. There is no way to use the QoS with the ATA behind the router. However, with my cable provider (Optimum Online), connection speeds are sufficient that no QoS is needed. (10Mb/1Mb). Additionally, my router has it's own QoS settings that can be used (if needed) to prioritize devices based upon their MAC address. So, the Motorolla's own QoS settings that are now disabled since it's plugged into my switch have no effect on me. Other than that, call quality and value for the money are fantastic. No complaints at all. One time out of a hundred they'll be a dropped call, as well as the occasional voice mail issue. However, these are minor issues and in no way would they make me change. We liked it so much, that we just picked up a 2nd ATA for our 2nd Vonage line. Great value. member for 21.2 years, 4650 visits, last login: 15 days ago updated 11 years ago
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