I have to say.  I was a Vonage Skeptic.  But when I bought a house, I decided to shop around for the best value in phone service.  I intended to only use my company provided cell phone and save some money, but my home turns out to be a black hole for Sprint service.

I usually just get the basic phone service with no frills.  I don’t even subscribe to long distance services.  That is what cell phones are for.  I had managed over the previous three years to get away paying about $30 per month for my Qwest phone number.  The only add-on that it had was unpublished number.  I have to have one work-free number after all, and who wants their co-workers calling them at home at all hours of the day and night?  (It has happened before, which is why I chose unpublished.)

I had three options available to me.  Vonage service is $24.99 per month with all the frills.  But we all know how those calls go with the tin can effect, dropped calls and breaks in the conversation when using Voice over IP.  Time Warner offered digital phone service with unlimited long distance and every calling feature under the sun for $39.99.  Since I was using Time Warner Cable for HDTV and Internet, this sounded like a viable option.  My experience with digital phone service from cable companies is that you can only have one phone jack and have more equipment to plug in along with all of your other electronics.  Continuing service with Qwest was my third option.  It would allow me to use the existing wiring and have cafeteria style services to avoid things that I didn’t want such as call waiting.

I called the Qwest representative and offered them my dilemma.  To make the decision easy on me, the sales person offered me basic local phone service for $25 per month plus unlimited long distance for $15 per month.  Great deal!  I would have phone service in my house and affordable long distance to replace what I was missing due to poor cell phone coverage from Sprint.  And the price would be in line with what I would have to pay Time Warner for service.  I signed up.

Qwest immediately sold my name and phone number to every telemarketer under the sun.  I made it a point to ask each telemarketer where they got my information.  More than one was willing to tell me the source.  Even after being on the national do-not-call registry, I was receiving over a dozen calls from telemarketers per day.  This was before I had even given the number to relatives.  I called to complain.

My demands of Qwest were simple: 1) cease and desist from selling my personal information including phone number, 2) block calls from known telemarketers, 3) pay me the profits that they realized from the sale of my personal information.  Rather than threaten to turn them over to the FCC and Attorney General’s office if they did not comply, I filed the complaints before calling them.  The representative told me that I would not even get any calls from Qwest employees.  They called a week later.

I got my first phone bill in the mail the other day and was shocked when I saw the amount due as $122.56.  And as anyone knows, phone bills are anything but intuitive when trying to figure out the itemization.  I called Qwest and finally got a human after several minutes of talking to some damned computer automated attendant that insisted on selling me more services that I did not want. 

The human went over the bill with a fine tooth comb and found that I was being charged for three different call forwarding packages.  How many ways can you possibly forward your phone?  I mean, your phone is either forwarded it or it is not.  There is no sense forwarding it after a number of rings because one of two things will happen by that time: 1) the answering machine will pick up, or 2) the caller will hang up.

After tearing apart every charge, surcharge and tax, the customer service rep determined that my base monthly fee for services after all discounts was $62 per month instead of the $40 that I was quoted.  I was told that there was nothing more I could do about it.

The days of a local telephone company having a monopoly over a region are long over.  There was something I could do about it.  I called Vonage.  For $24.99 per month they would provide not only telephone service but unlimited long distance to the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Puerto Rico.  Included in the package is call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding, distinctive ringing, call transfer, voice mail, and anything else possible with a telephone.  It does everything except the laundry.  All this with the first month and the equipment for free.  And the problem of calls falling out or sounding tinny has been taken are of or at least made the responsibility of the subscriber.  You can adjust the quality of calls that you make or receive by changing the amount of bandwidth that you will allow the service to use.  And the price is fixed.  It is a flat $24.99 plus tax per month.  No additional charges for anything.

As a bonus, I am able to get an area code from my home state.  For all intents and purposes, my house is now Indiana territory.  My next door neighbor and my employer will have to call me long distance if they want to reach me, but my family and friends from back home will be spared the cost.  I already dial 10-digit phone numbers for everything around the Twin Cities because of the multitude of area codes that we have and the obscure location of my property, so the impact on me is nominal.

I have several friends and co-workers that have switched to Vonage and swear by their service.  I have yet to find anyone that has the service that has any complaints about it.  All of the complaints are from people on the other end of the phone who only know that the call is going through a VoIP system and not necessarily Vonage.  There are a lot of bad VoIP systems out there that cannot be blamed on Vonage.

We will see how things go with Vonage and report back any results.