Vonage VOIP
Sep 26th, 2007 by Vinny
I have been using Vonage Voice over IP for a few years now. It has saved me hundreds of dollars in un-needed charges from at&t/SBC. The cheapest plan at&t offers is $12 a month for 500 local minutes and no long distance, which is very reasonable. The issue is fees that they charge on top of that. Those amounted to another $12 a month, which brings the total for a basic telephone line to $24! This is only local calls, which this area is shrinking every day.
With Vonage you can get a line for $9.99 with 100 minutes of anywhere calling. They don’t advertise this plan, but you can sign up for the unlimited plan for $24 and then after your free trial is over, switch to the cheap plan. This works great for people who don’t make alot of calls, or just want to keep a phone number they have had for awhile.
I am slightly worried about Vonage since they just got hit with another lawsuit ruling, they owe Sprint $69.5 million dollars and 2% of future revenues! That is out of control. Patents are awarded for anything it seems these days. What I don’t understand is Sprint and Vonage are not really competitors, Sprint doesn’t gain anything from suing Vonage except those funds (which all greedy corporations love).
There are other alternatives available, I have read up on a few but most of them seem to lack on the customer service side (from the reviews). Vonage has ten-fold improved their customer service, when I call I am instantly helped by someone who knows what they are doing and offers to lower rates without even asking. I wish Sprint would follow suit and improve their customer service, they have the worst in the industry.
You could also go the self-programming route, and install an Asterisk open source PBX and do all the programming yourself. This works great for small business and geeks alike, you can have a corporate phone system for very cheap! Just find a company that sells a SIP trunk, and they will send calls to your IP address which asterisk routes! You can even use Cisco IP phones with it (which now support SIP) instead of installing the crazy expensive Cisco solution.
VOIP is definitely a mature technology that can save you money. If you haven’t looked into it, there is no better time than now. You can get a great plan for any budget.