Give me 10 Minutes and I’ll Cut Your Phone Bill in Half
Last year when we started embarking on our journey to get out of debt we looked at what we were paying for different utilities and tried to figure out where we could save money. There were a couple of bills that we had that we thought we could get a better price.
One of them was our telephone. I have tried various plans over time, but because we live almost two hours away from my inlaws, and my wife likes to talk to her mom (whose doesn’t?), we needed a plan that gave us cheap regional calling.
What I found was that I was paying over $60.00 for an unlimited calling with features. And I had dial up Internet.
Enter Vonage
Vonage can literally cut your phone bill in half, and give you all the features that you’ve come to expect from one of the big carriers:
- Voicemail Plus
- 3-Way Calling
- Call Waiting
- Call Forwarding
- Area Code Selection
- Caller ID with Name
- Call Transfer
- 911 Dailing
- Free Phone Adapter
- And More!
All of these features come at no extra cost.
How it Works
Vonage uses your high speed Internet connection to send the phone signals. That means that you get a router to hook up to your cable modem and then you plug your phone lines into the router.
You can then give them your current phone number and then they will transfer it for free! The nice thing about this is that you can now get and receive calls from anywhere to that number. Move to a new location– keep the same number! Go for a vacation, get calls on your home number!
So, for the price of my old bill, I have high speed Internet, phone service, and flexibility!
Phone Quality
There are three things to remember about Vonage Service:
- Since your phone calls will be going over the Internet, the quality can some times be as low as that of a cell phone. There may also be incidents where you may have a dropped call or only one party may be able to hear. Simply place the call again.
- You will be using a router and cable modem to place calls– no need for your computer to be on. If the power goes out, you will need to have a back up source (like a UPS) or you will need to have a cell phone. We picked up a trac phone for our backup and keep a few minutes on it.
- You will have to tell Vonage your address. Since your Vonage number can go with you or be anywhere, 911 operators will need to have a location for your phone on record.
So, do you want to save more on your phone bill? Sign up with Vonage today and start saving money!
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Comments from MInTheGap
Leticia said,
Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 3:08 pm
Thanks for the information, that is pretty helpful about Vonage.
MInTheGap said,
Wrote on July 2, 2007 @ 3:30 pm
It’s a terrific way to save money– but its not perfect. It’s more like a cell connection than a land-line connection. There are days where we wish we were on the other, but for the money I can’t beat it.
Doug Logan said,
Wrote on July 4, 2007 @ 2:05 pm Subscribed
We’re on Vonage here too ;-). Like MinTheGap, one of the big reasons we made the switch was to save money. It was also very nice to be able to drop Sprint who we had some pretty annoying experiences with.
At the time I got Vonage was before there were 5,000 different VoIP companies. As a result I was a little worried about the reliability of it at first since it was new (Vonage announced 100,000 subscribers about a month after I signed up). For the first month I kept the sprint service and Vonage. The call quality was great and Vonage always worked fantastic. It was great to call up Sprint and cancel ;-).
In the 4-5 years we’ve had Vonage we’ve had it go completely out 3-4 times. Most of the time this happened was due to the internet being out in our area for various reasons. One or two times (mostly in the first year), Vonage actually had some issues that took the service out for a bit.
It is definitely great to have Meg be able to call her parents whenever she wants and talk for hours and hours, not worrying about the phone bill. She probably calls her mom 1-4 times a day!
Like MinTheGap said, however, every now and then a call will really break up. When I’ve run speed tests on my internet connection, this is usually due to slowness with TimeWarner instead of actual issues with Vonage. There have been a couple of exceptions. BTW, if you’re on DSL you will definitely need to configure you’re router to prioritize VoIP traffic, and set Vonage to use the lowest amount of bandwidth. The upstream bandwidth available for DSL is typically a lot slower than it is for Cable.
MinTheGap,
Do you have your Vonage backfed through your existing phone jacks, so you can use all of them throughout the house? If not I can probably give you directions on how to do this. I actually installed Timewarner’s digital phone at one point in time and was trained how to do it properly, though it is pretty simple.
MInTheGap said,
Wrote on July 4, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
I forgot about one more feature– all Vonage to Vonage calls are free! (Because there is a 500 minute plan that you can get for 14.95– but I found that I ate up those minutes too fast if I wasn’t paying attention.)
Doug, I grabbed a phone line duplicator type thing, crossed the lines and hooked up all the landlines in the house, so I’m set. Of course, when I go to sell my house that may be a different ball game, but for now I’m set.