rebus9
join:2002-03-26
Tampa Bay
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to sbk212
Re: Would Vonage Be a mistake?
I'll chime in as a 3-year Vonage customer currently with 5 lines (previously 6 lines).
Avoid them.
Originally they were this great little maverick company bringing this cool new product for mass consumption. Then they got "too corporate" for their own good. Most of their support is outsourced to foreign call centers that barely speak English and do nothing more than read from canned scripts. If the answer isn't in the script, they basically turf the call. It's a rarety to actually get an English speaking American on the phone.
Don't try to cancel your account with them. They'll repeatedly put you on hold, many report for as much as 10-20 minutes at a time. My guess (and that of others) is they hope you will just give up. IT DOES NOT-- repeat NOT-- take an hour and several times on hold to click a few buttons to close an account. It is just a stall tactic.
I had 6 lines and needed to cancel 1-- just 1-- of them because it was no longer needed. Holy crap, it was like I was closing a million-dollar account or something. The guy WOULD NOT do it, instead giving me excuse, afer excuse, after excuse, why I shouldn't be doing it. I had to get nasty and threaten to cancel all 6 lines, before he gave up and did what I wanted.
You are locked in for TWO YEARS, or they hit you with an early termination fee. The reputable players, including AT&T, don't have any such fees as long as you return the adapter.
A couple weeks ago I opened an AT&T CV account, and so far both the phone service and the people have been excellent (and they all speak English as a first language). My plan is to use it for a couple months to make sure there aren't any major issues, and if so, port my home number and 3 of the 5 business lines to AT&T CV. The remaining 2 biz lines will remain with Vonage, so we'll still have at least partial phone service in case AT&T has an outage.
Call quality-- I give Vonage a B+ or maybe an A-. Calls are reasonably clear even using their lowest quality setting to save bandwidth.
Reliability-- they've had several outages so far this year, but not dramatic enough that I would cancel just because of that. (2007 has been a rough year, 2006 had fewer outages) If you're going to use VoIP, expect it will happen once in a while-- price you pay for all the other benefits.
Pricing-- If you're going to spend money, you might as well go with a company that's financially solid. Vonage, AT&T CV, and Verizon VoiceWing are all priced at $24.95 for the "unlimited" plan. (unlimited meaning "5000 minutes per month" before they consider you an abuser) So why be a Vonage subscriber and wonder if they're going to be around tomorrow, when you can go with Verizon or AT&T who will be around forever.
My $0.02.
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