A Happy Home = A Phone That Works

A Happy Home = A Phone That Works

September 15th, 2006 @ 12:30 pm by Mrs. Lily
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Is this wedding related? Kinda. Let’s call it part of setting up your home together… (ok, truth– and self-serving for Miss Lily).

So, here’s the deal. 13 days ago, I switched our home local/long-distance service over to Vonage (a high-speed internet based phone company) because for whatever reason (me gabbing to my Mom about the wedding), our phone bills have been crazy high for the past few months. Finally, I had enough and switched on a whim. I can do this because Mr. Lily hates anything to do with bills and, frankly, unless they are direct debited he will not pay on time. Thus, the phone is in my name. Oh, and Mr. Lily could care less what I change the phone to.

The point here is that since the switch, my phone has SUCKED. This is me talking to my Mom:

Me: Hey, Mom, lets try to decide on the florist!

Mom: Sure honey, wah whkdjfgljkfdgkjldkgf

Me: What? Hello? Hello? Mom can you hear me?

Mom: I’m here! I djfkjdfj flowers sjdfkdfjkjfd decide fgdj love peonies

It’s awful. And tricky, because this only happens every third or fourth call. And yesterday I couldn’t get into my voice-mail. Just kept getting a busy signal. Argh. If you think I’m exaggerating, my Dad actually called me and offered to add an extra line to his cell phone for us to use as our home phone. Aw. So sweet. I like having a home phone though…

I have one day to decide whether or not to keep it or get slapped with the $50 disconnect fee (ouch). So, in the interest of all of you setting up your lovely homes with your FIs, I am sharing that my experience with Vonage has been a thumbs down so far. Have any of you used it and liked it? Am I doing something wrong? What other companys in NYC are good in case I decide to switch again today???

Tags: new-york |

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16 Responses to “A Happy Home = A Phone That Works”

Guest

amy

i worked for a very small company that used vonage for all 4 phone lines. we had mannnny problems with them: sometimes, the sound came through garbled, or people couldn’t understand us, or there was static on the line, or it sounded like a cell phone coming in and out of reception. their cust service was TERRIBLE and i tried repeatedly to get my boss to switch (he wouldnt, he was cheap).

9/15/06 @ 12:37 pm (reply)

Guest

stefanie

i didnt know people from our generation still had land lines

9/15/06 @ 12:50 pm (reply)

Guest

Lissa

Switched to Vonage about a month ago. At first we had a lot of issues but we have finally got all the bugs worked out and its great! So cheap too! The two big issues we found was how far away the actual phone was from the Vonage box and the strength of our internet. We had to have our cable company out to test and fix our lines (we had a VERY VERY weak signal) and then we moved the Vonage box to about the middle of our apartment. We were having an issue with a weak signal at the back of the apartment cause the box was in the front of the apartment. Once we fixed those two issues, its been smooth sailing.

9/15/06 @ 12:55 pm (reply)

Guest

Amy

Another very important thing to look into when weighing the options of VoIP services like Vonage is that 9-1-1 does not work the same way as it does with a landline phone. Each state handles it differently, so it’s worth checking into, for “just in case”…

9/15/06 @ 1:16 pm (reply)

Guest

christina

We have had Vonage for three years and right now it’s great. For a while there was a TON of static and then something happened with our cable and when we called Time Warner we were told that our internet connection was very very weak/slow. Time Warner came out to fix it and viola the phone worked great too. So obviously it was the crappy internet connection. We never noticed the connection being slow so I’d look into that. Vonage has been great since. And it’s 5-10 cents a minute to call abroad! (We make a lot of international calls.)

9/15/06 @ 1:18 pm (reply)

Guest

Kendra

When I first set up my Vonage I had problems with it all the time. It took about 2 months, but now things are great. I discovered that the phone router they sent tends to overheat, so I have it sitting on its side - seemed to fix the majority of my issues!

9/15/06 @ 1:22 pm (reply)

Guest

Miss Lily

Interesting that a lot of you had problems with Vonage at first and now it works OK. It seems like a lot of hassle since my old service was just instantaneous, but it IS so much cheaper… I just called Vonage and they tested my cable speed and apparently it’s very fast so that’s not the problem. They did something to boost the quality so fingers crossed it works. Found out I have until Sep 30th to cancel so I will give it another week!!!

9/15/06 @ 1:34 pm (reply)

Guest

Miss Beetle

I’ve also had vonage for over three years and have never really had a problem. I love the cheap bills and eventhough we are moving to brooklyn soon, we get to keep our 212 number. Also LOVE that all of our voicemails are emailed straight into my inbox so I never have to bother checking. I even recently added a vonage business line I like em so much!

9/15/06 @ 2:10 pm (reply)

Guest

asra

vonage SUCKS! sorry for those of you who seem to like it, but when we had it, the phone line would get cut at random times. it was really annoying. we switched back to a land line.

9/15/06 @ 2:25 pm (reply)

10.

Guest

TheBrideToBe

my brother is in the Air Force in Japan and he uses Vonage. He picked a local US area code so he doesn’t pay international fees!

9/15/06 @ 3:03 pm (reply)

11.

Guest

hmm. i never heard good things about vonage until i read the above comments. the people i know who have/have had it (not me personally) always have complaints - ranging from the fhfwhghwh thing with the phone, to randomly cutting off in middle of convos, to computers freezing if you try to use more than one “device” at a time. overloads the main board or something…

9/15/06 @ 3:12 pm (reply)

12.

Guest

i love vonage too. every now and then we have trouble with calls not coming through (but then peeps should really try our cells anyway) but never with garbled calls. i think you should wait it out.

9/15/06 @ 5:13 pm (reply)

13.

Guest

lauren

i used viatalk (same concept as vonage) in DC and it worked just fine. i loooved having free long distance.

9/15/06 @ 7:09 pm (reply)

14.

Guest

Ashley

We actually use Skype to call my mother and father, and bought an incoming line for their area code [it's a whopping $36 a year--can't be beat] and it seems to work a lot better than Vonage ever did for us.

9/16/06 @ 1:23 am (reply)

15.

Guest

Vongage is on our “go die” list. We’ve had so many problems that im sure they know our voices on the phone by now.

9/16/06 @ 1:52 am (reply)

16.

Guest

Style Graduate

I’m going to second the suggestion to use Skype - international calls are cheaper through them anyway!

If you can’t hear the other person on 25% of your calls, you aren’t really saving any money - you are just paying too much for crappy service.

9/16/06 @ 6:02 pm (reply)