Review: Vonage

I’ve been using Vonage for awhile now, over 2 years in fact, and I’ve had my ups and downs. Recently and periodically it gives me fits of frustrations that really bother me. I’m not a landline power user, I don’t make a ton of calls - the main reason I got Vonage was because of it’s Call Forwarding feature. This beauty of a feature let’s me determine that after a predefined number of seconds of ringing my landline Vonage will forward the call to my cell phone. This is of immeasurable help to me since I’m a contractor and sometimes out and about - it is very convenient for me to give people my landline knowing if I’m in a position to answer the phone I will be able to.

That has worked out very well for me. Sometimes too well, like when I’m on vacation and getting telemarketed to at $1/minute - but that isn’t Vonage’s fault. But there are drawbacks, the main one is that you share your bandwidth with the phone. So, if you are down/uploading something there’s every likelihood that your voice quality will be choppy if Vonage is usable at all. That is incredibly annoying - as someone who works remotely on several servers I am constantly downloading and uploading files some of them can be quite large having to pause them everytime I get a call is a real bother (many times, I end up just waiting for it to forward on to my cell phone, who’s reception is not great in my apartment, but better than Vonages when my bandwidth is in use).

This was such a problem that I actually upgraded my cable service to it’s premium package for increased bandwidth. This had other nice benefits and it did help quite a bit with my Vonage line. Of course, now the cost of Vonage isn’t so cheap anymore since I’m paying a lot more for enhanced cable. Also, there are times (like a few days last week) when the quality of the calls just suck (sometimes all the way to unusable) for no reason. There’s no traffic on my bandwidth and I still can not use my landline, this is the worst. I’m not sure what the cause of that is, perhaps its problems on Vonage’s pipe - too many people making calls. Also, obviously if your connection is down completely, so is your phone - but that generally doesn’t happen too often, although when it does it can make it annoying to, you know, call the cable company.

Another problem with vonage is that their website is really slow. Not unusably slow, for the most part, but there’s typically several seconds or more of lag time switching pages, especially when you’re trying to get to the voicemail page, where it can be almost a minute before it shows up. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but in practice, it really discourages one from going to the site and makes any access of the site a frustrating experience whether looking for a voicemail or maybe checking the call log.

Overall, I’d give Vonage a 6.5 out of 10. For the most part, now, it’s decent and the call forwarding feature is great. But to be honest I’d consider going to a no landline solution but for a few things. I love my 212 number as well as my cell number and want to keep both, I will one day get a fax line through Vonage and lastly I harbor the notion that I will get one of those Vonage dongle’s that let you travel around and use your vonage line from wherever you are. Those really are the three reasons I haven’t ditched Vonage, but I’m tempted everytime my landline is unusable for no apparent reason.

Mar 6th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: review · telephony