Is a Switch to Vonage Worth It?

After debating it for awhile, my wife and I finally decided to give Vonage a try. I had used voice-over-IP before and found the quality to be good. The holdout had been that I was concerned about losing phone service whenever when we lose Internet service. Since we use RoadRunner as our Internet service, the possibility of the cable service going out always exists, especially during winter storms. Having the reliability of the POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) was something that was difficult to just give up. However, after looking at the last bill from AT&T, we made the decision to take the chance and make the switch.

Signing up

With Vonage, you have the option of going to a store such as Best Buy to sign up for the service and purchase the equipment or you can do it online. Since I like to limit my exposure to in-store salesmen, we opted for doing it online. The first thing you need to do is choose a plan. They have several plans to choose from including a basic plan of $17.99 which gives you 500 minutes a month. We chose the standard service of $24.99 because it includes unlimited usage. Since we have never analyzed how many minutes we normally use on our landline, we figured we would start with the standard plan and we could always change it to the cheaper plan if we discovered that we used less time. Also, Vonage was offering $9.99 for the first 3 months but you had to get the standard plan.

You will need to have a Vonage phone adaptor in order to use the service. We were given the option of purchasing a new phone adapter for $9.99 or getting a free, re-condition adapter. As long as the unit worked when received, I felt that the re-conditioned unit would be fine. The last option that we were given, was to decide whether to keep our current telephone number or request a new number. Since we did not want to go through to hassle of distributing a new number to everyone, we opted to keep our old number. Once we gave authorization to make the switch, Vonage took care of everything, including canceling our existing service. As such, you do not want to cancel your service prior to signing up for the Vonage service.

With the other option of having a new number assigned to you, you can choose which city and state the number is assigned to regardless of where you actually live. This would be a major advantage if you do not reside in the same city as most of the people that call you. For instance, lets say you have moved to NY from Greensboro, NC. All of your friends and family are still in Greensboro. You can have a Greensboro number assigned to you, thereby allowing everyone in Greensboro to call you on a local number instead of incurring long distance charges.

Installation

The final step of signing up was to fill out the billing information and wait until the phone adaptor arrived, which took three days. Upon receipt, setup of the system was very simple. The package included the phone adaptor, an Ethernet cable and the power supply. The instructions described how to hook up the adaptor to your Internet service and to a single telephone. The adaptor acts as a router and firewall if you do not already have one in your system. The directions indicate how to connect to the internal web server of the adapter to setup the router options. However, since I have a router and switch already in my computer network, all that I needed to do was to plug one end of the Ethernet cable into the adaptor and the other end into my switch.

As stated, the instructions describe how to connect one phone to the adaptor. However, all you need to do to connect all of your house phones to the system, is to just plug the adaptor into an existing household telephone jack. This will back feed the phone connectivity to all of the phones in your house. Before you do this, you will probably need to go outside to the telephone junction box to disconnect your existing telephone service. The junction box usually has just a standard phone jack that the service is plugged into. All you need to do is just unplug it. Then you are free to hook the Vonage adaptor into your wall jack. If you want to have a phone plugged into the same jack as your adapter, you will need a splitter, which you can get at any radio shack or other store that sells telephone accessories. Once you get the adapter plugged into your phone jack, you should be good to go. The phones should work just like they always had.

Included with the Vonage service, are features such as voice mail, call forwarding, call waiting, etc. You can access these services through the Vonage website. Since we had our old number transferred, it did not take affect until the next day. As such, Vonage issued us a temporary number so that we could use the service immediately. One of the first things that you will want to do, is to make sure that your address is set up in the 911 system. Since voice-over-IP works differently than POTS, the 911 information is not automatically setup. Once you sign into the Vonage website, you go to Features and from there you can setup your 911 information along with all of the other features that Vonage offers.

Performance

We have been very happy with the performance so far. We have noticed that it takes calls a little longer to connect than before, which is not a major concern. When calling my in-laws, they have noticed a slight difference in quality. However, it may be because they are on VOIP as well. I have had to reboot the adaptor once in the three weeks that we have had the service. I did this because we were able to get a dial tone but the calls would never connect. Once rebooted, everything worked fine.

One of the initial concerns that I had, was about bandwidth usage. However, we have multiple computers on our network but have not yet experienced any bandwidth issues. Of course, our normal bandwidth runs around 6.5ms down, so there should be enough overhead available to handle most situations. The one complaint that I do have is that Vonage does not offer per line caller ID blocking, which prevents your caller ID information from being displayed for every call you make. You can block the information from showing up on a per call basis by dialing *67 before placing a call but I really prefer having this done automatically for each call. But this is just a minor inconvenience.

Final Thoughts

Vonage appears to be a good, reliable service, which represents a viable replacement for the standard landline service. Would I recommend it to others: depends on their situation. If it will save you money on your telephone bill, I would certainly recommend it. In our situation, because my in-laws live close but still in another city, we had to subscribe to what our local service called the expanded local-area calling plan. This put our telephone bill at over $65 a month. With taxes, Vonages $24.99 plan will be about $32 a month, far below what we were paying before. Therefore, the savings more than justifies the switch. However, if your standard service runs about the same price as Vonage, I would generally recommend keeping it just for the reliability issue of always being available, even through the worst winter storms.