Hot Vonage deal!

[xxrillixx]

If your looking at vonage anyway... might want to check it out...

Linksys Phone Adapter with 2 Ports for Voice-over-IP (Vonage Service) - PAP2

$51
-$125 MIR (with new activation)
+Free shipping
-----------
-$74!

Linksys & vonage deal - WITH NEW ACTIVATION!

 

[TheShiz]

if i recall correctly circuit city has a good deal too, something like free $200 gift card instantly if you sign up for a year of service, it could be $100, but I think it was $200 and the deal may be over now

 

[slayer202]

hmm, they pay you to sign up

 

[superHARD]

they can do that (2 year contract at $25 a month)...and still make money

 

[cpm2]

That's a great deal. I eventually went for the Wireless G router with 2 phone ports with the same rebate - net cost -$14.14, not as good a saving, but I got a router too.

Vonage is offering free international calls to the UK (and other European countries) with their residential premium unlimited plan at $24.99 per month - good for me with family over there.

Thanks!:thumbsup:

 

[ncage]

I am not saying this is a bad deal or trying to stink the thread but i just want to tell new people to vonage their routers are horrible. You would think that since they are linksys they would still be ok but no. The hardware is linksys but the firmware for these things are produced by vonage. THe "phone" part of the router works great but the other features are flakey at best. I was having trouble with making an international call so they upgraded my firmware.....well with this new firmware upgrade port forwarding did not work at all. How could they miss something like this? Yes it was not only my system..everyone who upgraded to the newest firmware could not use port forwarding. Before this the router was flakey. I would have to reboot it ever 1-2 weeks. So moral to the story is i like vonage service but get yourself another router and connect the vonage router to other router that is plugged into your cable modem. I ended up setting up a vmware instance with openbsd on my server at home and set up openbsd as a firewall (i still wanted QOS).

Ncage

 

[Pulsar]

This is probably a good deal for vonage - but I'm going to point out that both Viatalk and Sunrocket offer more features for far less money. Both do specials every couple weeks where you get 2 years of service for $199, or a little over $8 a month.

When I signed up for mine I also got $3 a month of international calling credit - international calling is pretty cheap for both services (.03 / minute to Canada and the UK).

Compared to vonage's $24.99 a month, it's no wonder they can do these huge rebates - they're making a killing.

Comcast is even worse at $33 a month.

 

[Dealbuyer]

I've Had Vonage... And I've Had At Least 2 Other Less Well Known VOIP Providers...

I've Had Friends Who've Had SunRocket With Mixed Results.

Vonage Is One Of Those "You Get What You Pay For" Companys.

Vonage Had The Best Voice Quality & Best Customer Service - Hands Down.

They Are Not Neccessarily The Least Expensive Monthly, But Definately A Solid Service!

These Rebate Deals Are A Good Reason To Give Them A Try...

 

[jmunjr]

One of Vonage's "servers" went bad last week while I was on the phone with a friend. We got disconnected and for the next 4 hours my phone rang non-stop saying the call was from my friend even though he was not calling.

The funny thing is my friend was pissed at me about something and I thought he hung up and was prank calling me, but in reality Vonage's system was in a loop calling me over and over.

After an hour of trying to reach my friend(he was at work) he finally answered and indicated he was not calling me. then after 20 minutes of talking to his work's IT/phone people with no success tracking the issue I tried to reach Vonage, got a support guy from India named "Jeffery". "Jeffery" could barely speak English and must have been the dumbest Indian on the planet. He also repeated everything I said to him.

Anyway for once I decided to give these Indian customer service idiots a chance. After 90 minutes "Jeffery" the idiot Indian CS rep concludes that he has fixed my simultaneous ring.... uh..... wait. Yes folks the moron for 90 minutes worked on my simultaneous ring, not the problem above.

Finally I told him to get me with someone who spoke English in the USA. After much resistance he gave in, upon which I was connected to what sounded like and African born man with another accent, only he was understandable..and he was in New Jersey!

Anyway, it took this new guy about 4-5 minutes to tell me about the problem, that their techs were aware of it and it would be resolved very soon(and it was).

This is not the only time Vonage has sucked. In fact EVERY time I have called them for help(about 4-6 times) I got the dumbest Indian on the planet helping me, each of them repeating everything I say to them. These guys may cost 1/5 as much to employ, but when it takes 18 times as long for them to fix your simultaneous ring without success it makes sense to hire real Americans.

Foir this and this alone I have begun my search for a new phone company...

 

[Robor]

I had Vonage for about 6 months and I've had Sunrocket 2 times and currently use ViaTalk. Here's my quickie review...

Vonage -- The good: Best reliability and voice quality (near perfect). The bad: Expensive, fewer features than other VOIP providers, didn't pass outbound CallerID name (the deal breaker for me as my calls often looked like spammers)

SunRocket -- The good: Lowest price, best contract terms, free hardware, great features. The bad: Very unstable and customer support is pretty much non-existent.

ViaTalk -- The good: Low price, great features, very good voice quality, more reliable than SunRocket but not as good as Vonage. The bad: You have to pay for the hardware, only 50% credit if you cancel after 1 month.

** Keep in mind this is in my experience. I'm sure others have had good/bad experiences with these companies. I'm just giving my experiences here.

 

[Esquire]

id be happy to refer anyone who is signing up, keep me in mind email or pm me

vonage is decent, voicemail to email is sweet

 

[Dulanic]

Originally posted by: jnmunsey
One of Vonage's "servers" went bad last week while I was on the phone with a friend. We got disconnected and for the next 4 hours my phone rang non-stop saying the call was from my friend even though he was not calling.

The funny thing is my friend was pissed at me about something and I thought he hung up and was prank calling me, but in reality Vonage's system was in a loop calling me over and over.

After an hour of trying to reach my friend(he was at work) he finally answered and indicated he was not calling me. then after 20 minutes of talking to his work's IT/phone people with no success tracking the issue I tried to reach Vonage, got a support guy from India named "Jeffery". "Jeffery" could barely speak English and must have been the dumbest Indian on the planet. He also repeated everything I said to him.

Anyway for once I decided to give these Indian customer service idiots a chance. After 90 minutes "Jeffery" the idiot Indian CS rep concludes that he has fixed my simultaneous ring.... uh..... wait. Yes folks the moron for 90 minutes worked on my simultaneous ring, not the problem above.

Finally I told him to get me with someone who spoke English in the USA. After much resistance he gave in, upon which I was connected to what sounded like and African born man with another accent, only he was understandable..and he was in New Jersey!

Anyway, it took this new guy about 4-5 minutes to tell me about the problem, that their techs were aware of it and it would be resolved very soon(and it was).

This is not the only time Vonage has sucked. In fact EVERY time I have called them for help(about 4-6 times) I got the dumbest Indian on the planet helping me, each of them repeating everything I say to them. These guys may cost 1/5 as much to employ, but when it takes 18 times as long for them to fix your simultaneous ring without success it makes sense to hire real Americans.

Foir this and this alone I have begun my search for a new phone company...

Ya that was the first time I ever saw Vonage have a big issue. It was happening to me also, when I called about it I didn't get an indian tho.

 

[Schoolies]

My experience:

SunRocket
Customer for a year. A year of hassle and bad phone quality. The person on the other end always sounded fine but I never knew how I sounded to them until they said, "I think we have a bad connection, are you on a cell phone?". I would have to say about half the times the outbound quality was ok and half the times it was not. Even when the quality was ok, it still did not sound very good and you could tell I was not using a regular telephone line.

Customer support seemed to go through the same manual over and over again. No one really took the initiative to try and really help my problem other than telling me, "please turn off the Gizmo and turn it back on" and then the worst of them all, "Please run a speed test, 5 times, every half hour with your gizmo unplugged"!! I can't tell you how many times I ran that damn speed test and gave them the same damn results that my upload/download speed was acceptable.. not only that but 5 times with every half hour!


Vonage
Just signed up with them. I did a side by side comparison of Vonage and Sunrocket. I did the 30 day trial period with Vonage while I still had SunRocket.

Plugged in Vonage for 3 weeks - never had one sound quality problem outbound or inbound (except when I was doing some heavy downloading and upload but that was expected).

Plugged SunRocket back in - same problem as before - sound quality just ok and often times outbound callers asked me to call them back because they could not understand me through the jitteryness and noise.

Conclusion
Soo I am satisfied with my testing and it is clear to me that Vonage is the winner when it comes to sound quality.... they still lack some of the features that SunRocket has and are not as cheap but sound quality is more important. Vonage does have the Soft-Phone feature that SunRocket does not have.

My telephone should be transfered by the 3rd of January and then I will be tossing SunRocket out of the window.

 

[rugby]

Vonage seems to work fine, I had them a while back. However if you have problems and need to call support then good freaking luck. The only time I got through quickly to support was when I was routed to retentions when I was trying to leave. Once I ported my #'s away to another provider Vonage kept assigning my #'s to other people signing up! Talk about incompetent. It took 3 rounds with support to get them to stop giving my #'s out.

I tried Sunrocket and they were a complete joke of a company. I finally cancelled after 2 weeks when nothing worked properly and nobody at support could help me.

I currently use Nuvio's nPBX system and it's definitely not a residential class of service. It has great stability yet the portal sucks badly.

I'm also currently a Viatalk user for 2 additional lines and really like their featureset. I have 2 BYOD plans that for 2 years cost me not quite $350. I have an * setup for one line and the other line I have configured on a Polycom IP501. Using a digital IP phone makes all the difference for call quality I've found.

If anyone's interested in trying Viatalk PM me as I have an affiliate link.

 

[ncage]

i have only used vonage. I think their service is pretty dang good most of the time. Most calls are as clear as a land line. Of course i have had the echo effect before but its not that bad. I had one issue that got routed to 2nd level of tech support and vonage people could not figure out. When i call a friend in mexico city i would get "lines are temporarily busy". They never could figure it out. So to this day i can not still call this person. According to this site (http://www.consumersearch.com/www/internet/voip/index.html) CallVantage is the best but it will even cost you $5 a month more than vonage.

 

[jimmybgood]

For any of these plans, what does the bill actually come to with fees and taxes? My landline costs $11.75, but even if I have no long distance calls or extra charges, the bill totals about $20.50. So, is Vonage's $14.99 plan really $24?

 

[twisted2]

I have Vonage for 2+ years with the $14.95/mon for 500 minutes combined local and LD. Just looking at billing history:
Jun 15, 2004 $16.94
Jul 15, 2005 $16.94
Jun 15, 2006 $17.87
Dec 15, 2006 $18.77

Yeah it sucks a little but it's better than Verizon's cheapest plan.

 

[rugby]

I paid $199 for 2 years of viatalk without any additional fees. I already had an ATA so I didn't have to get theirs.

 

[dmw16]

there was a much better deal at Circuit City a few months back when I signed up. It was the $200 gift card and all. Anyway, to answer the question about the bill, I have the $14.95 a month plan and after taxes and fees i pay $17.