As mentioned last week, we’ve had it with Vonage and decided to cancel our account. It wasn’t from bad customer service or shoddy call quality, it was because of the negativity that has swirled around the company since they went public. The numerous class action lawsuits, the floundering stock price, the overspending on internet advertising some of which is indirectly funding spyware/adware. Add all that up and it can drive away customers who have been happy for over two years.

This is a big change from what I said about Skype a little over a week ago. That I had pretty much lost interest in them. Well, looking around at other VoIP solutions out there, particularly with the current Skype promotion that allows free SkypeOUT to US and Canada for the rest of the year and, well, Skype as a telephone solution became compelling again. Using them as a chat service my opinion still remains, I’m not a big chat person. It’s strange to make a comparsison that way I realize, but that’s how I’m rationalizing the sudden and renewed interest. Also, it might be that we just want to get away of Vonage that bad. With Skype being part of eBay I don’t think they are going anywhere anytime soon. We might have gone with Comcast but they were too expensive comparatively.

We didn’t completely axe Vonage, we still are using them in one of our two businesses. When we cancelled my wife told the guy that we had another account. He didn’t try to put on any sort of AOL-style hard cancel sell on her. The account was disconnected immediately. Dial tone gone.

So where did we go? After reviewing numerous VoIP options out there: Packet8, broadcom, Earthlink, Comcast (too expensive) we saw a couple different cordless Skype options at Best Buy. The Linksys CIT200 allowed tapping into your Skype account and going cordless.

I was surprised that Skype still had my old SkypeIN number still reserved, so we reactivated that for $38 USD, paying by PayPal of course.

There was only five days left to renew that number before it was released back into the wild. I thought they had said they would only keep that number reserved for 60 days, but turns out it was more like 90 days.

The first thing to do once we reactivated our SkypeIN number was unpacking the new CIT200. There are two separate components: the phone/cradle and the base station which plugs into the computer via USB.

Only one of three computers we tried hooking up the base station installed correctly. It kept prompting that Add New Hardware wizard looking for drivers that didn’t exist. Got on the phone with LinkSys tech support and don’t ever, ever call Linksys on a Sunday. I was on hold a little over one hour before somebody came on the line. The first person I spoke to burned up a good five minutes before realizing she wasn’t qualified to help me with the CIT200, so I was rerouted to a level 2 technician. On hold another 10 minutes until I reached Ricky. It was then an hour of back and forth with Ricky before the conclusion was that the base station was bad and we needed to return to Best Buy.

Meanwhile we are charging the handset. It comes with two AAA rechargeable batteries that take 14 hours to bring the cordless phone to a full charge. I dissembled everything, put it back neatly in the box and we returned to the store.

One thing I really like about Best Buy is the return system. While my wife took the defective CIT200 to the return desk, I grabbed the last one on the shelf. It was literally a five minute process. The woman from Best Buy didn’t even look inside the old box to make sure all the parts were there (they were).

The second base unit had the same problems. It wouldn’t work in two of the three computers tested. I didn’t feel like calling back Linksys again, so we just ran it with the one computer where it did work. We can still use Skype on other computers so it wasn’t a huge deal that it didn’t work with the two other computers.

There was another brand of Skype phone at Best Buy that if this experiment works we’ll be buying and using at the office for our other business. The call quality of the CIT200 is good although the ringer is a bit soft. Luckily, I have it near the desk so I should hear it. It is lightweight and easy to operate. The CIT200 comes with 60 minutes, rather $1.26, of free SkypeOUT credits.

Now begins the laborious task of changing phone numbers for our online business in all the places it is published. You can see our SkypeIN number in the picture above and I’ll need to change the one on the homepage here and where published elsewhere.

While at Best Buy we noticed another USB base station device that lets you plug in any telephone into it and we will probably buy that also, just in case the CIT200 doesn’t work out. For the price ($99 USD) the CIT200 doesn’t quite cut it. I wouldn’t recommend buying this cordless internet phone. It seems to work good once you get it configured but I wasted far too much of a Sunday fooling around with it to be happy. Most people want to just plug in a phone and be done with it, not spend hours on the phone with tech support. Grade: D

• Renewing SkypeIn and voicemail from webpage link
• Is Skype going backwards with pay-per-minute billing?
• Just paid for SkypeIN
• Skype toolbar beta unimpressive so far
• 2 years without Vonage problems using Comcast here
• Will eBay extend free Skype to Phone calls in US into 2007?