Bet my business on Vonage? Input requested!!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 18, 2005 Posts: 4

I am opening a cellphone store in Orange County, NY. I plan on having one hard line (for faxing) and the two or three Vonage lines.

Outages will, of course, be a problem for any business.

I plan on sending the network availability number to my cell or to the fax line.

I am open to any suggestions any of you may have!!!!

Also, I am interested in any technical differences between Vonage's "business" line as opposed to the "regular" line. For example, does the business line get better help desk access or something?

Thanks in advance,

bill@webperson.com

Posts: 18 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Mar 08, 2005 Posts: 18

I have been running my sales rep biz over Voip for over 18 months. I calculated just the other day that I've saved over $1500 vs POTS in that time. Have I had outages ? Sure. But I'll bet my uptime is still well over 99.9%. It's not the five-9's POTS "claims", but it's been good enough for me. At this point in time, reliability has been acceptable enough that I will NEVER return to SBC's high priced/taxed wireline offerings.

That said, I was 30 minutes into a 3 way conference call (that I originated) the other day when Vonage had a systems wide problem. Bye-Bye conference call... <shrug>

I have my network unavailable number set to my cellphone, so incoming isn't a real problem.

I run my Voip over a wireless ISP. I'm confident Vonage has better uptime then they do. Since you're in the communications biz, you probably understand outages are a fact of life. That's a good start.

[edit]

Oh, BTW, with the biz offering, you get a free FAX line - I think that's about it - I'm using the Biz1500 plan for ~$44/mo. That's 1500 minutes of outgoing/mo.

Contrary to some flamers, FAX works fine w/ Vonage. You just need to "turn down" the speed - some machines can, some can't.