My review of Vonage and why you NEED to read this before switching to VOIP

After nearly two years of discussing it, my husband and I finally made the switch to Vonage and so far….so good! We had wanted to make the switch to Vonage for quite some time but had some questions and concerns. Hopefully, my review of the service and experience switching will answer some of your questions as well.

This is one of the most extensive and detailed reviews of a product I have ever written, so if you are truly interested in how switching to Vonage can save you time and money, pull up a chair and a cold drink and get comfy!

Why we decided to look into Vonage

We had already made a partial leap toward VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) when we switched from our old-school landline to Comcast Digital Voice. With that experience safely under our belts (and burned on our psyches) we decided to make the switch to Vonage. A friend’s family had been using Vonage for a couple of years and I had noticed that when we spoke, there was very little difference, if any, from their old service. That was a good sign.

Here are some factors that played into our decision to switch:

1. Comcast Digital Voice was ok…nothing spectacular. The service was not always predicatable and I had trouble with calls suddenly dropping or breaking up into a “digitized” sound at the worst possible times. A technician visit to our house resulted in no change and numerous calls to their technicians resulted in no explanation for why it was happening.

2. The price for our phone line seemed to creep up a little every three to four months. While we did get a small discount for having our phone, Internet and cable on one bill, it wasn’t significant enough a discount to stay with service that was spotty.

3. We were paying extra to have long distance service in the United States and limited countries. In fact, I’m not entirely sure we could have even called Canada with our old service and not seen an additional charge.

4. We wanted stability. We wanted to know exactly what we would pay every month, regardless of the calls and where they were to. We also wanted to be reasonably sure that the price wouldn’t go up a little every month.

How we learned about Vonage

A friend of mine had been using Vonage for a couple of years and I never noticed a difference in the quality when I spoke to her so that was my first testimonial. A few checks of forums to see what other people thought also led me to believe that the service was reliable and CLEAR. A clear phone connection is super important to me as someone who works from home and must often make calls to businesses and co-workers.

Vonage: The signup process

I decided to take advantage of their referral program and reward my friend who told me about Vonage. At the time I signed up, Vonage was giving away two free months to new customers and two free months to the person who referred them. The referral process was easy and just required me to enter my friend’s phone number into the online form. I have not confirmed if she has received two months of credit to her bill yet, but I will update when I do find out.

The signup process was very fast and easy to understand. The best part was that I didn’t need to be the one to make the “break up” phone call to Comcast and tell them I just wasn’t into them anymore. Once I had established that I wanted to use the service and entered my contact and billing info, I was assigned a temporary phone number. Once my equipment would arrive, I would be on my way!

The equipment arrived a bit later than I expected because UPS left the package, in the rain, at the wrong house. A kind neighbor noticed it IN THE GRASS and brought it to my door. This is NOT the fault of Vonage, only UPS and I don’t hold the late delivery against Vonage in any way.

Inside the box were three pieces of equipment, a user manual and a quick start diagram. The three pieces of equipment were an adapter box (about the size of a DVD), a power cord and a network cord that connects the adapter to the back of your modem or router. The fold-out diagram is very easy to understand and the directions are thorough.

The directions are flow-chart style and indicate, “do this first, then this, then this”. Simple! I won’t go into the nitty gritty of what I plugged into where, because all of that is laid out in the instructions. Suffice to say, it was less than 5 minutes until I had a dial-tone.

I made a test call to my Mom and she said she didn’t notice any flaws in the call. She said it sounded different, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. She said, “I don’t know, maybe it sounds even clearer than your old service and that’s why it sounds different?” My husband called from work and was not able to detect any difference at all. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear, but we decided to keep testing it for a few days and see how it went.

Because Vonage can transfer your phone number to their service, but not right away, we were assigned a temporary phone number. I decided to forward our calls from Comcast (using Comcast’s online service center) to the new number in the meantime so we wouldn’t miss any calls. It worked perfectly!

A few days later, we were convinced that the switch was a go! As I mentioned earlier, Vonage takes care of porting or transferring your old phone number via a button in the online control panel. They instructed us not to call our old phone company and simply cancel service because that would also cancel our phone number….not good. So I initiated the transfer with one click and got periodic updates via email about the progress. Within about five days the transfer was complete and so was our switch to Vonage!

Vonage and their 25 Standard Features

The Vonage World package ($24.99 a month) comes with the following features standard….. self-explanatory features include: Caller ID with name, Call Waiting, Call Waiting with Caller ID, 3-Way Calling, Called ID Block, Call Return, Do Not Disturb, Anonymous Call Block, and Repeat Dialing.

Additional standard features include but are not limited to….

1. Voicemail Plus: Lets you check your email online, or on your phone and you can also get email and text message notification of new emails.

2. Call Transfer: lets you transfer your call to another phone number (cell phone, etc) mid-call! You don’t have to hang up, just transfer the call and keep talking from the new phone. This would be a great feature for a small at-home business when you need to run out to a client meeting or other errand. Keep on talking!

3. Vonage Online Account: Everything (and I mean, EVERYTHING) about your account is available online in an easy-to-use dashboard system.

4. Enhanced Call Forwarding: forward your calls to any phone number in the world!

…..and a bunch more! Check the Vonage website for more details on some of the other features. Since we have not used some of these,  don’t feel I should review them because I can’t give an accurate opinion.

Some things I really like about Vonage:

1. Their online dashboard system that lets me access every aspect of our Vonage account from setting up voicemail alerts, to listening to voicemail, to making changes to our service. To this day, I have never had to call Vonage or speak to anyone about anything related to our service. That’s the way I like it!

2. Voicemail is easy to use and flexible. You can opt to receive an email each time there is a new voicemail waiting for you, or for an additional small fee (25 cents per voicemail) you can have an attachment of the voice mail (in .wav format) emailed to you along with a transcription of the voice mail. I tested this service to see how accurate the transcription was, and it was perfect! You can even have these emails sent to up to five different email addresses and it’s still just 25 cents for each individual voicemail. Great for families or if you would like alerts at work, home, and on your smartphone. You also receive a basic SMS text message as well.

3. Long-distance service is free (from the United States) to about 60 countries (see the Vonage site for a complete list). Long distance service within the United States is also included.  Be sure to check to make sure that calls to cell phones in your desired country are included (too many to list here) because there are only some of the 60 countries that include free calls to cell phones in addition to landlines.

Some things I don’t like as much about Vonage

1. It really only works well with a true, high-speed Internet connection. This is not for someone who is working with a mediocre connection. How can you tell? Call your Internet service provider and ask if you have the medium/higher-end connection. This is particularly true if you are running multiple pieces of hardware (a desktop, laptop computer, wireless home network etc) on one connection all at the same time. My home is wired for everything (wired and wireless) so there is constantly something using my bandwidth but I haven’t had any trouble at all.

2. You may need to adjust the amount of bandwidth that Vonage uses for your connection. I put it in the “not like” category simply because it is one extra step for someone who has multiple things running. That said, adjusting the bandwidth in your dashboard is quite easy and fast.

3. I wish that Vonage would let you listen to voicemails as streaming in your dashboard rather than making it a .wav file that you either have to open with your default program for .wav files or download and open later. In my case, my default program for .wav files is iTunes, and if I don’t have it open at the time I want to listen to email, I need to wait for iTunes to boot up. If they made this one change, I would be thrilled and plan to bring it up with their development team.

What you should know about options and add-ons

Vonage offers a variety of options and add-ons in addition to their standard, Vonage World service (which we have) that gives us unlimited local and International calling to 60 countries for $24.99.

Annual Prepay Options: Vonage offers Vonage World (the regular plan with International calling to 60+ countries) for a yearly fee of $239.99 which brings your average monthly price down from $24.99 to $19.99. This is a yearly savings of about $60.

There is also a limited plan for people who use under 500 minutes a month. It’s called, appropriately, the Basic 500 Minutes Residential Plan and at the time of this review costs just $17.99 a month. There is also a “Pro” plan that costs $34.99 a month that also lets you use your computer to make calls instead of just your landline phone. Business plans are also available, but I have not used any of them in order to review.

What you need to know before switching to VOIP or Vonage in particular:

There are some considerations you need to be aware of before switching to Vonage or any VOIP provider. First, be sure that your Internet connection can handle the load. I don’t recommend that you try to use Vonage with a slow connection, so if you live in an area where high-speed Internet is notoriously not “high-speed” you may want to think twice about this.

Second, you need to live in an area or have a history of good and reliable sources of electricity. If you live in a rural area and your electricity is prone to outages or if you live in an area prone to natural disasters, you may want to stick with a landline. No electricity means no Internet which means no phone. No phone, means no access to 911 so be aware.

Third, I recommend that you only switch to a VOIP provider if you have a backup phone such as a cell phone. Any outage, whether electrical or Internet means you don’t have access to 911 in an emergency. This is especially important if you have children. DO NOT SWITCH TO VOIP WITHOUT A BACKUP PLAN.

Fourth, be sure that when you setup your Vonage account that you specifically check in your account for the recorded address for you in the 911 system and make sure it’s accurate since this is the information that will be given to emergency personnel when you call 911.

My overall impression of Vonage

In summary, I highly recommend looking into Vonage if you have considered a switch to a VOIP provider and have seen your bill for regular landline service creep up in the past few years. We live in an area that has the infrastructure to support the switch (high-speed internet and reliable power) and feel it was a good move for us both in terms of having good reliable service and for the financial savings. We are saving about $15.00 a month ($180 per year) on average compared to our old service. To us, that is a significant savings and was worth the switch!

Feel free to ask specific questions in the comments! I’d be happy to share more details about our experience with Vonage!

P.S. If you join Vonage using this link, you will receive one month of service for free. In the interest of full disclosure, so will I. I’m an actual Vonage customer and other than free months I receive for referring new customers, I have not been paid or compensated in any way for this review. So there!

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