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Review by tasmithe 
member for 10.6 years, 2171 visits, last login: a few hours ago
lodged 9.3 years ago
 Siler City,Chatham,NC
 Contract price not specified.  "Price" "customer service/tech support" "Vonage is bad"
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I had Vonage for a few months and am cancelling. I don't find their quality good at all. At first I thought it was my ISP--but--after taking all of my stuff over to another town where they have Road Runner (twice to 3 times faster than Charter), I find that the problem is Vonage. Poor quality on calls--particularly on the send side. People say they hear clicking, buzzing etc. I have tried all different types of phones and they all do the same thing.
Therefore, I am bagging Vonage and adding minutes to my cell service--which I should have done in the first place. It's cheaper and great quality.
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 Review by compulov
member for 12.3 years, 1176 visits, last login: 98 days ago
lodged 9.3 years ago
- Lakewood,Ocean,NJ
- $17 per month
- "Great value, great quality"
- "Not quite as many "cool" features as some competitors"
- "Reliable, inexpensive telephone service with PSTN quality"
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I signed up with Vonage in October of 2002 to replace my Verizon land line, and have never once considered going back. I'm a very low-usage land-line user, but don't want to drop it in favor of cell quite yet, because I don't want to give my cell number to everyone. I initially didn't port my land line number over to Vonage because I wanted to test out the service for a few months, but once I was satisfied it worked, I ported my number. That was about the only time I ever had any contact with their tech support, primarily because Verizon had some out of date information on my record which prevented Vonage from porting my number over. If I had any complaints, it would have to be that hold time was a bit long (around 30-45 mins or more if I recall correctly), but otherwise the support techs I talked to were a pleasure to deal with.
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 Review by silverton
member for 12.7 years, 143 visits, last login: 6.6 years ago
lodged 9.3 years ago
- Palo Alto,Santa Clara,CA
- $25 per month
 about 7 days- "flat rate!"
- "comcast bandwidth management"
- "vonage is excellent, but dependent on isp reliability"
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my wife was literally blown away by Vonage call quality. she had been complaining about the phones for months, saying that she was going to go buy new ones (which actually prompted me to try Vonage, as our phones are not cheapos!). i really didn't want to spend another couple of hundred dollars for a quality indoor wireless phone set capable of supporting multiple handsets from a single base station.
enter Vonage, which i learned about here on BroadbandReports, of course  .
Vonage call quality in our first month has actually been significantly CLEARER than was SBC POTS. that is to say, we hear our callers with crystal clarity and my wife didn't go out and buy new phones!
yet as i've written so many times before, it turns out that once again we have an application that is all about the UPSTREAM bandwidth. we are running Vonage-over-Comcast and our callers do not always enjoy the same call quality that we do. there are occassional cut-outs similar to a cell phone; callers often ask "are you on a cell phone?" to which we respond, "no, we hear you perfectly."
any loss of quality or reliability is not due to Vonage in any way. if there are any lags, it's because Comcast lags.
if Comcast, as all ISP's, would ever get the clue that symmetric bandwidth is not a PERK but a REQUIREMENT, then VoIP would cream POTS within a very few years; not to mention the increased capabilities of P2P in general. VoIP is nothing more than a particular application of P2P, after all.
setup was impressively simple. i run a fairly complex network for a residential user, including BSD, Mac, and Windows. the Vonage box plugged in and grabbed an IP off of the DHCP server and worked IMMEDIATELY! very, very simple and very impressive. of course, i had to find the MAC address so i could then assign it the same IP every time and we now have vonage.palo.ourdomain.net in our little home network family.
one thing the Vonage equipment DEFINITELY needs is a blinkin-light that tells you when you have a voice mail waiting. this is an almost unforgiveable shortcoming, as the system can email you or message you whenever you get a voice message. sending an ON signal to an LED on the base unit would be utterly trivial.
i give Vonage a 9 out of 10 overall during the first month of service; although we'll keep an eye on it for another 60 days before cutting SBC out of the picture entirely. we'll let you know when we make the final leap.
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 Review by npatrick
member for 9.8 years, 416 visits, last login: 2.1 years ago
lodged 9.3 years ago
- Charlestown,Suffolk,MA
- $16 per month
- about 5 days
- "Low Rates, Easy to hook into existing wiring"
- "Can't use as backup dialup line, 911 "service" shouldn't be expected"
- "Great Rates, Excellent for second line & Long Distance"
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I saw the banner ads, read the reviews, and ran the numbers. It made sense for us to try Vonage for our second (fax) line in our home. Plus the risk was low - if it went down, we still had Verizon.
I ordered the service (using an affiliate link of course!), and within a few days I received the box. All I had to do was plug it into our router, plug in a phone, and away we went.
One initial issue was that the router was blocking certain ports which were used by the Cisco box. There was one phone call which never rang because of this problem. Fixing it took all of 30 seconds on the router, and we haven't had a missed call since.
Our second line was also used for me to dialup into my work network. I found out the hard way that VOIP and dial-up networking don't play well together - this continues to be an issue since I would rather not use our primary line to check email at work.
Vonage promotes 911 service, but I don't plan on depending on it - it sounds like the routing of the calls isn't exectly up to where is should be yet.
I have since wired the Vonage line to run throughout the house by disconnecting us from Verizon on the second line. It took almost no time at all (mostly spent trying to figure out which line running into the house needed to be disconnected).
We save about $30/month over our Verizon service (we subscribe to the $14.99 500 minute plan and use this phone for Interstate calls only), and feel free to talk for hours calling family far away. Quality of the phone calls is very good - I get a clicking while dialing, but not once the call is connected. No one can tell I use VOIP.
All in all, it's good to know there is some competition to POTS.
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Review by midlife2
member for 11 years, 714 visits, last login: 8.1 years ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- Jamestown,Russell,KY
- $37 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Great call quality, Reasonably priced, Easy installation"
- "Tech Support"
- "Awesome if you live on a budget and use alot of long distance"
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I've been using Vonage since its inception, and I love it to death. The call quality is better than my local phone company. The majority of my family lives in Texas and I live in Kentucky so I call there all the time. The Vonage service has made it possible for me to talk as long as I want AND have a local number that my family can call me on. That feature alone sold me on this service. The Vonage web site is top notch with clean navigation and just about every usage feature you could want. I love the feature where you can see all the calls placed and recieved...I find myself goin there alot to look up phone numbers that I have forgotten. The install process was completely idiot-proof....Plug it into a router and off she goes. The only issue I had was with the tech support. I called and emailed several times asking about a particular routers problems with the service. At no time did I EVER recieve an answer....when the phone there wasnt busy it would ask me to leave a message. That was when I first signed up and the service was new though. Hopefully they have made positive changes to their customer support.
Overall I would highly recommend Vonage to anyone out there who makes tons of long distance calls 
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Review by forestville
member for 9.4 years, 68 visits, last login: 1 year ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- Sunnyvale,Santa Clara,CA
- $40 per month
- about 8 days
- "Unlimited calling to Canada and low international rates"
- "Mixed quality on overseas calls; surfing may disrupt calls."
- "Excellent choice for cable modem users. Questionable cost benefit for ADSL users."
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Unfortunately, I must maintain a landline due to inconsistent quality of overseas connections. I have not had problems with calls within the US. Vonage says that they are working on these problems. It is fair to assume that these problems will be fixed overtime.
I had problems with cutoffs in the past, but that was attributable to a bad cable modem, rather than a fault of Vonage's service.
I use Comcast.
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 Review by ross96
member for 12.5 years, 2501 visits, last login: 286 days ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- Salem,Columbiana,OH
- $27 per month
- about 5 days
- "Good Deal"
- "Customer Service"
- "Pretty Good Deal for $27 a Month"
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I have had the service for about 5 months now and have been pretty satisifed. Call quality is decent and features are cool too. Customer service is suspect at best. I haven't had to deal with tech support so I didn't rate it. I still have a pots line for mainly my incoming calls and emergency service if necessary(oh and my DSL too). Call quality is about the same between the pots line and Vonage. Overall I am pretty impressed with Vonage service.
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 Review by ATLJ
member for 13.4 years, 2089 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- Sugar Land,Fort Bend,TX
- $27 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 7 days
- "Great Quality and cost savings compared to the Bell company."
- "There have been some outages but they never effected me."
- "Great quality and service for the price."
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I signed up online and received my Cisco CPE in about 7 days after the order. The quality is better than my SBC line was and the amount of features included are great. My SBC bill with 2 features cost my $42 a month and I get all the features now for $27.
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Review by chikkaturp
member for 9.4 years, 1 visits, last login: 9.1 years ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- South Richmond Hill,Queens,NY
- $27 per month
- "1"
- "4"
- "3"
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the calls get lost sometimes
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 Review by NukeMeElmo
member for 10.2 years, 1435 visits, last login: 5.4 years ago
lodged 9.4 years ago
- Austin,Potter,PA
- $34 per month
- "Good good stuff."
- "NONE"
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Vonage is great. I got the service back in August. Got the Cisco ATA. I placed the order on their website and within 2 days the ATA was at my door. The setup is about as easy as you get, I plugged the ATA into my router, checked the DHCP logs, got the LAN IP of the ATA, tossed it in the DMZ and......dial tone. Wow...that was tough. Never had a problem with it. I would highly recommend this service to anyone that makes any long distance calls. My woman goes to school a couple hours away from and we can talk as much as we want. I'm one happy vonage customer.
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