Last Friday afternoon, I finally jumped on the Vonage bandwagon and signed up for service. Tuesday afternoon, I recieved the special hardware to connect between my computer and cable modem internet service. Tuesday night, everything was operational.
For roughly $27 per month (after taxes), I have unlimited local and long distance (U.S., Puerto Rico, Canada and some European locations) along with voicemail, caller ID and some fancy call forwarding options.
To get roughly the same service from my telephone service provider, Verizon, I would have to pay $50, and most of that fee was made up by local, state and federal taxes. Granted, it remains to be seen how long Vonage and other Voice over IP services will be able to keep their fees low but for now, I can deal.
So far, voice quality is great and even though Vonage supplied me with a virtual phone number for people to dial while my old phone number is ported from Verizon, I can dial to my old phone number and it will ring through.
Conceivably, I can take my Vonage router on the road with me and connect with a high-speed internet access point in the hotel or someone's house and still use the same phone number. Conceivable but not practical, especially since my cell phone provides unlimited long distance across the country. Then again, if I go overseas, this would be a cool thing. I really wish though, that a "soft phone" which would allow me to use my computer as a phone through the service was available without having to set up a whole new account.
My big question though is whether or not Verizon, while it still has ownership of my phone number, will try to tack on a charge for when I dial a long distance phone number from my Vonage service.
I decided to go with Vonage because some people I know already have the service and love it, there's lots of positive user reviews about voice quality at Cnet.com and other places and they are probably the most common consumer VoIP provider.
