VONAGE.COM voip phone service DEAL OR DUD?

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Jul 09, 2007 Posts: 1

I'm thinking of switching from Dallas TX - ATT.COM to Vonage Voip. However, Vonage seems tooo good to be true. Do you or do you know anyone that actually has Vonage Voip? If so, would you or they recommend the service to others. Word of mouth is more important to me vs. any website or commercial they can offer. Thanks in advance for taking the time to reply!! Bren

Best VOIP

Posts: 352 · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 7:53 am Post subject:

I have only had Vonage for about a month. Call quality is better than what I had on Verizon at half the cost.
The biggest concern is your internet connection and cable modem. Make sure they are up to date and compatible with Vonage. Your Vonage experience will only be as good as your internet connection.

Posts: 1327 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Nov 08, 2006 Posts: 1327

Vonage is a good deal, for me it is.

Posts: 4777 · Vonage Forum **MVM** Joined: Aug 30, 2005 Posts: 4777

There are a lot of people here in the forum who have used Vonage Voip for a long time. I have, and it's worked well for me. Read the postings here for awhile and you'll get very frank discussion about the virtues and shortcomings of Vonage.

Posts: 69 · Posted: Mon Jul 09, 2007 11:40 pm Post subject:

I've been with Vonage for over a year. Excellent call quality, 0 issues.

Posts: 14 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Jun 10, 2007 Posts: 14

Don't make the mistake of using Vonage, the company falsely advertises a 30 day money back guarantee. They won't honor it in any meaningful way. When you cancel they don't return the money to you by crediting it to your credit card, they credit it to your Vonage account. I've emailed their customer care about it but never received a response. They're either crooks or so badly run that getting what you're owed is next to impossible.

Posts: 174 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Jun 12, 2006 Posts: 174

Customer service seems to be the BIGGEST issue people have. Sure, some have issues with quality and other things, but, again, customer service is the biggie.

I've had Vonage for more than a year -- I've got an iffy Internet connection at best (only option I have where I live), and I've been perfectly happy with Vonage service and it has saved ME a lot of money. The savings is bigger for some than others, it just depends on your situation.

I've needed to call customer service one time since I've been a customer -- was it a delight, with no problems? No. But it was far from a nightmare and, after a total of about 15 minutes of hold time, I got my issue resolved.

The best advice you've gotten in this thread is to hand around this forum and read for a bit . . . you will learn a lot about what you might expect if you switch!

Posts: 17 · Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 3:34 pm Post subject:

I've been with Vonage for a little over 2 years and it has survived a couple moves and different Internet providers. I have been very happy with the quality and extremely happy with the added services (free caller-ID, call waiting, voicemail, etc...) I have found that I have issues with sending faxes though. I have to tell my fax machine to use "overseas mode" every time I want to fax something... I haven't found any relatively inexpensive fax machine that this setting can be made once and it ALWAYS stays in that mode... they all revert back to normal. I am about to make yet another Internet service provider change, this time to a 20 Mbps bidirectional FTTH (currently 8Mbps/768Kbps cable modem). I don't envision any issues. I did notice issues with phone quality when I had a lower upstream data rate... when I had a 256Kbps upload, I would get digital audio artifact from time to time... sporadic, but after increasing it to 768 Kbps, no problems. 256Kbps is plenty BUT is shared with other traffic and variances occur, dropping for tiny bits. Higher bandwidth raises that threshold. I've only had to contact customer service a couple times, and that has been to insure proper credit of referrals and that has been a total nightmare. While customer support is supposedly 24-hours, only a few of those hours are actually in the US by people that have any capacity to DO anything.

Posts: 12 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 04, 2007 Posts: 12

I have Vonage in two USA locations, two ISPs, three different phone adaptors and all has worked well for over one year. As has been said, biggest prob seems to be calling Vonage help and cancelling service. I find ability to pick up voicemail by pc anywhere to be a great advantage. I'm still in the camp that supports using Vonage.