Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

May 13, 2008

By Daniel Connor

Welcome to the Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

Vonage recently announced a partnership with Covad, which will enable Vonage to provide its customers with a broadband solution using Covad's nationwide DSL network. Essentially, Vonage will resell broadband packages carried by Covad after cutting a "wholesale DSL" deal with Covad. This now gives Vonage the "Double Play" bundled package that is often a competitive advantage to last-mile broadband copper/fiber owners, including the telcos and the cablecos.

The new service, called Vonage Broadband, is expected to be offered by the end of the year. Vonage will offer DSL services to both residential and small business customers.

Vonage CEO was quoted as saying, “This past quarter we spend about 27 percent of our revenue on marketing (and) we expect at the end of the year we’ll be spending between 30 and 32 percent. The company has $150 million in the bank and we’re going to use that money,” he said. This is great news for Vonage. With most if not all of the big lawsuits settled, Vonage appears to be willing to spend money to acquire customers.

There's a hot thread in the Vonage forums "How to use callback to make another call" that is two pages long. The poster wants to be able to be able to either call a Vonage number, hang up, and then have Vonage or his computer call him back and let him dial the number the poster wishes to call. The reason is his cellphone plan has unlimited free inbound minutes, but he pays for outbound. So how do we solve this mystery?

Well, the thread includes some helpful suggestions which we'll summarize here. First, you can leverage the group calling feature from the Vonage ContactBook. You can also specifiy a non-Vonage number for the call. The caveat is that you need browser access to click on a name to dial. But if you have a smartphone with a browser you should be able to simply click on a number in your contact book, it'll then ask you what number you want to call from, so you could choose your cellphone. The contact book is still in beta though, so there are issues and all the features don't work as advertised.

The ContactBook also has a cool Group Calling feature, that lets you be connected simultaneously with 5 other callers. Another cool feature, but it won't work remotely on your cellphone is the Voice Activated Dialing – Simply dial *44 from your Vonage phone and say your contact's name and Vonage Voice Activated Dialing will place the call for you.

Alternatively, another poster suggests "installing a DialMate CM1003 ( see www.woodtel.com ) and do a call back (for free incoming cell phones), bridge (for free calls to favorite numbers), or forward (for free incoming) using Vonage's Call Transfer feature (so that the Vonage line doesn't get busy, allowing simultaneous multiple calls). You can also program "*69" as the call back number so that you can call from any USA-numbered phone any where in the world."

Vonage Tip of the Day:
How to enable Do Not Disturb on the phone
Dial *78 from your Vonage phone.

How to disable Do Not Disturb on the phone
Dial *79 from your Vonage phone.

Or just unplug your phone's cord from your Vonage ATA device, but what fun is that?

In The News
Today, Vonage is currently trading at $1.81 and closed yesterday at $1.85 or 2 cents higher from Friday's close.

Vonage VoIP Forum Digest - May 13, 2008