Broadband Phone Service
Rick and I are looking into broadband phone services, namely Vonage. I was hoping that perhaps some of you may have experience with such things and would be able to give advice and tell me how you liked or didn't like it. Any info is appreciated, thanks!
xoxo
posted by Good Wife @ 8:10 AM
7 Comments:
Here is a comparison of the VoIP (voice over IP) services. AT&T's Callvantage came out on top, but you should see which one is the most suitable for you in terms of cost, features, and customer service.
My SIL has had Vonage for almost a year and loves it. No customer service issues at all.
The main problem with current VOIP is that you're going over public networks (the Internet). New VOIP networks are being built where the voice portion travels over a provider owned IP network. This will increase the voice quality. Something you'll hear from people is that they hear voice great (because the downstream bandwidth is higher) but that the person on the other end (non VOIP) gets broken voice periodically because your upstream bandwidth is much smaller then the downstream. Just something to think about - alamedawahoo
I have Vonage and am very happy with it. The price is great and it has a lot of nifty features. I still have a land-line for my alarm system and DirecTV boxes, but I still pay less now for vonage plus the bare-bones land-line than I did when I had just the land-line with all the features I now have with vonage. And that doesn't include the now-free long distance.
Sometimes the quality isn't as good as a land-line. You know how sometime when you are on a cell phone you get a little bit of delay or echo? It's like that. But no worse than you get with a cell phone.
I bought one of those multi-phone cordless sets at costco so that I could plug the base into my vonage box and then be able to use the cordless phones anywhere in the house. I recommend doing this instead of trying to get vonage working with all your existing home phone wiring.
I hear from third parties that broad band phone service is good and cheap. The only problem with it is that if the power goes out so does your phone service. Where we live with drastic winters and all, power outages are a yearly occurance. We do have cell phones that would work if the power went out but I'm still leary about making the switch myself.
We tried out AT&T CallVantage earlier this year and had a lousy time with it. The service wasn't all it was cracked up to be and the customer service was even worse. You can read the details of our ordeal here, here, here and here.
We've also been looking into Vonage. I'm pleased to hear other people seem to like it.
Imagine the power of tens of thousands of other web sites being able to easily
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