PC World Rates Vonage Top VoIP… Seriously
Anyone who has been reading this blog, or many of the Vonage forums very well knows about the patchy nature of the Vonage VoIP service. If you have used it, you have experienced the issues with Vonage first hand. Perhaps that is why I was surprised to read that PC World had named them their VoIP service of 2006. [Just updated the link. Sorry about that. They link Vonage profile to an old 2004 story, which is what I originally linked to! I have updated the post to reflect that.]
PC World in an older article said that Vonage set-up was easy, which is still pretty accurate. But then they praised their audio quality, and their support website.
I bet there is a lot of customers who disagree. One of the common refrains about the company has been its customer service. Regardless, I think the reason to use Vonage, if you have to is their softphone access, and using it as a back-up, especially when you are on the go.
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I may have to rethink my subscription to this mag. The article states concerning Vonage’s quality:
“Only a few people complained about the audio quality, which often was better than that of cell phones.”
Is this the pathetic or what?
… not that anyone else faired better according to the article, but since when did cell phone quality become the standard.
One thing voip should have in it’s favor by now is good clear wideband hi-fi call quality!
My wife hated the fact that we have Vonage. I keep it because of the price. We have cable broadband and I have not found a way to beat the free long distance and some of the features like having my voicemails emailed to me. That being said, every technical issue is your ISP’s fault according to them (and there are plenty of technical issues). How can I say otherwise?
Here are some of my favorites in no particular order:
I feel better now.
If there is a better service I have not heard of it.
CArl
maybe i would sound like a voip-luddite, but flat rate plans from phone companies that use the old technology are not that bad afterall?
I experience with Vonage was horrible. The first month everything worked fine. After the promotional period, making a call became as difficult as an arctic adventure. I switched to Skype long time ago.
Now I know why I cancelled my subscription to PC World.
I’ve too have experience horrible service with Vonage. I have one line to an internet provider, and another from the Vonage box.I had to hook up the telephone on the Vonage box, so I can use it for the house.Also, your other telephone is hook up in the wall jack for internet: you don’t use that phone at all. Your internet service have to know who is your phone provider. If my childrend was online, my Vonage phone starts to act up BAD. You can hear statics, people talking fast like you’re pressing a fast forward tape,. It was horrible!!! They technical help somewhat ok. You can tell they all form out of state, and they try to keep you as long as they can to resolved the problem. But they only thing I like is, they price is cheap. And if you cancelled before your contract expired, you have to pay the a fee. So good luck try at your own risk!!!
My experience with Vonage remains positive. The major issue I have had is infrequent inaccessibility of voice mail. Note that I am a simple residential customer only – I use no fancy services.
Is anyone else linking to old article here (May ’04 and mentions Dialpad) http://yahoo.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,115053,00.asp
I’ve had nothing but good experiences with Vonage in the 3 years I’ve had service with them. I’ve used the service with DSL, Cable, and now FIOS and other than a few minor glitches never had a problem. I haven’t tried the rest, but I know that from talking to people on Lingo or Packet 8, I’ll take the sound quality of Vonage over them any day.
Problems with Vonage? I’ve had none in over a year that I’ve been a customer. I have had problems where my cable service went down and hence Vonage didn’t work, but that’s Comcast’s fault.
The only problem I’ve had with Vonage is that it is too expensive and proprietary. I kept one line with them (I don’t dare try to “port” the phone number out to another service).
For softphone, there are other VoIP services that don’t lock you in and require you to add a line to get a softphone.
For example, ZingoTel uses Sipura ATA’s, but you can program any standard softphone to USE THE SAME PHONE NUMBER. I switched one Vonage line to ZingoTel’s $5/month limited plan and it is just fine.
If you have several extra lines and don’t make a lot of calls on them, the unlimited plans are just too expensive.