Uncategorized admin on 20 Jul 2004 09:13 pm
V to the O to the I to the P
can you hear me now?
So, I got Vonage, like a month ago. My old phone number is moved over to the Vonage line and the phone line is disconnected. I still have one land-line and a cell phone so I’m not too concerned about losing phone service during a power outage.
Not that I answer the phone anymore anyway, which is a good reason to dump my $45 a month service in favor of $16.94 a month service from Vonage. I’ve got the 500-minute plan, which is plenty. That’s either local or long distance. I could spend hours talking on the phone long distance and my bill won’t go up a cent. I’ve also got all the usual things, like Caller ID, Call Forwarding, Call Waiting, and voicemail — that I can check on a freakin’ web page or have e-mailed to me.
I set up a rule in my home e-mail program to forward my voicemail to my work address; this afternoon my voicemail came to me in the form of an audio attachment, which was sweet. It was a phone solicitation, but still…
Call quality is peachy. There will be some lag if I’m doing an FTP upload during a call, so I don’t do that. The Motorola V1000 phone doohickey will automatically throttle the outbound FTP connection but there’s still a 1 to 2-second lag in the conversation. Without outbound network activity there is no discernible lag or loss of quality.
And it’s about $30 cheaper every month, as previously mentioned. That’s enough cash saved every year to pay for a spiffy new iPod. Woot!
2 Responses to “V to the O to the I to the P”
on 31 Jul 2004 at 6:04 pm 1.Mark said …
Our Qwest bill was topping out at over $50/month, which was without any fancy options beyond caller ID and voicemail. Just put in the order with Vonage. Went for the $24.99 plan though.
on 01 Aug 2004 at 11:54 am 2.MostlyHarmless said …
Yeah, $24.99 will let you talk _all_ the time, to people all over the country, without the concern that your bill will go up $20 because you spent a lot of time talking long-distance.
I just got a refund check from Qwest from my last payment, that was pretty cool. I continue to not even notice the Vonage payment.
I am starting to miss the No Solicitation feature that I had on the old phone line; a couple of human solicitors got through because I hadn’t moved my caller ID box over to the Vonage phone yet and I foolishly answered the phone without knowing who it was. Now at least I can see who’s calling and ignore them if applicable. The non-human solicitors still leave messages but I can delete those from a web page.