Review by sullim4 
UPDATED: 330 days ago
member for 5.4 years, 461 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
 Redmond,King,WA
 $18 per month (12 month contract)
 about 8 days
 "Excellent call quality, excellent price, solidly reliable so far."
 "Lack of true 911 service."
 "Best VOIP provider out there."
| Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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----- Update (11/15/07) -----
Well, after 2+ years of Vonage, I've cancelled the service. The billing issue I spoke about below has since been fixed, but it came one day too late, as I signed up for CallVantage the day before.
It's too bad, because it's nice to see an independent phone provider compete against the entrenched incumbents. However, it's just unacceptable to me that you'd have a sev 1 issue like this billing snafu and not fix it for weeks on end. That to me shows a total lack of respect for your current customers.
Cancellation was a pain in the neck, but I was expecting that. Sucks to live in the Pacific time zone, since they only take cancellations between the hours of 7am and 8pm M-F, EST.
CallVantage is working out great so far... but that's a story for another review.
----- Update (11/2/07) -----
Updating my review to reflect the fact that the billing portion of their website has been inaccessible for the last THREE WEEKS. Apparently this is affecting folks who are on the 500 minute per month plan. Unfortunately this means that not only am I unable to view invoices, but I can't figure out how many minutes I've used in the last month without me manually going through my call history and figuring it out! I was charged more this past month, but I can't view my bill to see why, nor can I determine if it was a mistake!
Their ETA for fixing it is mid-November, which is totally unacceptable in my book and as a result I'm looking at alternatives. CallVantage is my first choice, but I'd be unable to port my number, and I wouldn't be able to acquire one that would be a local call for my folks back in NYS.
----- Update (4/23/07) -----
I thought it might be time to update the review. Vonage has continued to deliver quality service to me even though I've moved several times since my original review.
My only negative experience has been with tech support. I tried to drop my primary number and replace it with my virtual number. I had to be bumped up to level 3 tech support to do this and all seemed well. However, someone acquired my old primary number and all of a sudden voicemails to me started going to him! Levels 1 and 2 of support were totally clueless, and when I finally got connected to level 3, my cell phone's connection was dropped. No attempt was made to call me back, email me, etc. It took an hour of explaining my situation to Indians to get bumped up to level 3. For whatever reason the problem went away a month later and so far, so good.
The Verizon patent case has made me revisit my relationship with Vonage, and in the end I've decided to keep them. I can't port my number to POTS since it's an east coast number, and the thought of switching to another VOIP provider doesn't appeal to me at this point. Hopefully Vonage will be able to pull through.
----- Original Review (9/29/05) -----
In late July I decided to order Vonage. The main reason for this was because I was moving into a university apartment where telephone service was $21/mo just for local service, plus any and all long distance charges. Plus, the telephone would have been shared with three other people, something that was far less than optimal in my view.
I placed the order on a Tuesday and it arrived the next week on Wednesday. Now from what I've read the DHL/USPS arrangement is slow, but there's really no excuse for an 8 day wait in my mind when the distribution center in OH was only 150 miles away from the destination. However, this wasn't a big deal to me because I hadn't moved into the apartment yet and didn't need the service that instant. Once I did get it, the Linksys router was very easy to install.
I signed up for the $14.99/mo, 500 minute plan. I've been very happy so far. Call quality has been excellent, only very occasional echos depending on who I am on the phone with. Reading the information here there seem to have been some outages during my time as a customer, but they haven't affected me when I've wanted to use the phone. I decided to add a virtual number to my account, pushing the monthly cost up to about 22/mo. I would like to know why there's an activation fee attached to adding a virtual number - instead a disconnect fee might be appropriate to discourage people from getting rid of them and encourage people to get them. I can't comment on tech support as I haven't had the need to call them, but I have heard that they've been less than stellar. Since I don't have firsthand experience with them, I did not rate that component.
Overall, Vonage is an excellent value and I would heartily recommend them.
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