In response to Loren’s question about firsthand Vonage experiences we have extensive firsthand experiences, which I’ve noted along the way here with other Vonage-related news [28 total Hmm search results for “Vonage”].

In particular, here’s a post of note:
October 7, 2004 - Is Skype going backwards with pay-per-minute billing? This post explores and compares advantages Vonage has over Skype and the whole pay-per-minute pricing model:

Business owners that start realizing how much they can save by switching to VoIP with unlimited LD plans will be exiting the traditional phone companies in droves. About the only reason we kept any of our traditional phone service was because we didn’t want to lose all our publicized phone numbers. You build a business and if you can’t port the phone number you are trapped. But I think the local phone company is one of the worst businesses out there. They don’t care about giving better deals because in our area they are the only game in town … except now for places like Vonage.

Our Vonage experience since February 2004
We started using and continue to use Vonage since February 2004. In fact, 100% of our residential service is currently through Vonage and 90% of our business lines are through Vonage which saved us something like 75% over what we had been paying with the telephone company.

Most people are surprised when we tell them we are talking to them over VoIP.

We would have switched 100% to VoIP if not for the fact that we couldn’t keep our existing business numbers (800 line and primary, advertised number since 1994). They say you can transport some numbers, but none of the numbers we wanted to transport were available. So we are victims, one might say, of phone number lock in.

We currently spend a couple hundred dollars a month on phone service (not counting cell phone service or OnStar), which includes multiple Vonage business service, fax and Vonage residential service. This expense is down some 70% on average from the $1,000+ a month we used to spend when we were 100% with the telephone company. Oh, and Vonage has actually lowered their monthly rates one time since we’ve been with them. I don’t remember the phone company ever doing that. What small business owner can’t get excited about this?

The vast majority of time the Vonage call quality is very good — better than Skype, which we also use — but there are peaks and valleys with quality, as mentioned by others in Loren’s comment section, especially if the network bandwidth is strained. We’ve used Vonage for literally thousands of calls though and overall the experience has been positive. If it gets bad we can always go for the cell phone. When the connection is good it is much better than a cell phone connection and when it’s bad it’s worse than a spotty cell phone connection. The average amount of time, however, call quality on both our networks is superior to regular telephone service in quality.

At our office in town we use DSL, at at home we use cable. Performance across both connections is the same, although we have more bandwidth on cable, we also have the added strain of multiple Xbox Live accounts and online PC gamers. Running multiple Xbox live accounts and Xboxes plus online gaming like World of Warcraft, plus running the Slingbox and then trying to make a quality Vonage call can be dicey, but then we never use all our cell phone minutes anyway.

So it might be worth considering for a high bandwidth residential household to purchase additional bandwidth or maybe run dual connections: DSL and cable. If you are in an area like we are where the phone company doesn’t have any unlimited long distance calling plans and your household makes a lot of long distance calls and uses the internet a lot, the extra money for a dedicated DSL line (and also a backup computer line) could be well worth it.

Overall we get by fine with a single cable connection. Like I said, we can use the cell phone if the network is in heavy use. With Vonage Caller ID you can see who called so it’s no big deal if the phone quality is low due to network activity to call somebody back on the cell phone. Honestly, in the year and a half plus that we’ve been with Vonage this has only happened a couple times. It hasn’t been a nuisance.

As for Vonage customer service? In the beginning we had to contact them for a few things but honestly we haven’t really talked to them since so I don’t know if the quality is still there or not. There hasn’t been any reason for us to contact them, really. We had one situation early on where we would occasionally get dead dial tones but that problem went away. We’ve been using the same equipment we bought over a year and a half ago.

We also like getting copies of voice mails sent as .wav attachments via email. That is very valuable Vonage service for record keeping and follow-up.

I would recommend Vonage highly to those who have a good broadband connection. For those with a spotty or heavily taxed broadband connection? Might want to get one of the Vonage 500 minute a month plans to test it out first on your connection.

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