Review by priller 
UPDATED: 244 days ago
member for 9 years, 3856 visits, last login: 2 days ago
 Gainesville,Prince William,VA
 $23 per month
 "Decent compliment of features; good customer service; easy for the average person"
 "500 minute plan is the most expensive in the industry; Charge you bogus fees;"
 "Vonage always works; good for the non-technical average customer"
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(ratings match consensus)
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My business plan to keep Vonage alive: »Re: Vonage Losses, Subscriber Cancellations Increase
Update 12/24/2008: After 6 years as a customer, I ported my number and canceled my account. With the price increase, there is no longer value in the service. The cancellation process was painless.
Update 12/3/2008: I got a proactive call from Vonage customer care. I was told that existing customers were supposed to have received 60 days notice of the price increase. Due to the error, they will be reversing the charge and giving me the $14.99 rate for 6 months. Kudos to Vonage for proactively making calls to the customers that had their rate increased without notice.
Update 12/2/2008: The Residential Basic 500 plan has increased from $14.99 to $17.99. With the fake fees and tax, the bill now comes to $23.31. Vonage did this without any notification to it's customers. There is no excuse for that. I can't understand why Vonage works so hard at driving customers away. At this price, the service is no longer worth it. Vonage has become the same phone company that they fought to win customers away from.
I'm just short of 6 years as a customer and I have started the process to port my number to voip.ms. Honestly, I feel like a fool for supporting Vonage for so long. Bye.
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As of Jan 1, 2008, I've been a Vonage customer for 5 years.
The service is exceptionally stable. Dial tone and voice quality is always there. Setup is painless for the average non-technical user. The set of features is worthy.
I started with the residential unlimited plan then changed to small business when I was working from home a lot; now back to residential. Each time I switched plans it was quick and painless.
Vonage replaced my ATA twice. Easy and convenient process.
Customer service in the past 2 years has been great to deal with. The reps speak English as a first language and have been either in the USA or Canada. However, this wasn't always the case.
I had a fax line for a while. It worked about 90% of the time. Fax on VoIP is inherently hit-or-miss.
The worst thing about Vonage is that they have jumped on the bogus "fee" bandwagon .... Regulatory Recovery Fee, etc. The added fees and taxes have to make you question if POTS isn't a better choice.
The pain of trying to cancel Vonage is legendary. Various forums are packed with stories of bad experiences with "retention agents".
Vonage needs to move to the next level of customer and allow BYOD and allow Pay-as-you-go plans. The "unlimited" plans are more than most people need. You can get excellent service and PAYG plans from providers like Callcentric.
Overall, Vonage is probably a good choice for the average non-technical user. I hope they are around for a long time.
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