Thursday, July 17, 2008

Vonage Broadband : An Honest Review on Vonage Broadband

By Ray Lam

Presumably the most well known VoIP service provider today is Vonage. Their service providers offer a inexpensive voice calling service via your broadband internet connection. Although, additional charges may be applied based on the monthly plan the user select.

What is Vonage and how does it differ from your landline connection? For a start, you must have a broadband connection, preferably cable-based; a dial-up is no good. When you call Vonage customer service for a connection, Vonage sends you a tiny box, which you have to plug to your telephone and your cable modem or DSL. You are now set to start a Vonage conversation. With a Vonage connection, you have access to your telephone through your computer and the broadband connection. The other big difference from a traditional phone service is cost effectiveness; with a Vonage, you can cut your telephone bill significantly, and converse worldwide by buying local telephone numbers from Vonage.

Vonage is considered the best service provider of commercial and residential VoIP solutions, plus offers feature-rich services combined with preferred customer assistance. Vonage, for instance will not charge for technical support, some smaller companies do.

The Vonage Website lists the charges applicable to each city on its network. Perhaps the best part of Vonage is that you can carry your US telephone number to any part of the world with broadband connectivity, and call the US at local call rates. For any reason, if you are dissatisfied with Vonage services, you can opt for the 14-day (or 30-day for some packages) money-back offer. However, Vonage is not all positives. Its founding premise is a bit wobbly; your connection is afloat only as long as your broadband connection is. Any Internet outage and Vonage will cease to function. Call quality is also dependent on the speed of your broadband. Then there is the question of availability of a local number for your city; Vonage may not have your city listed, so you should confirm this with Vonage customer support before deciding on the service. Vonage is facing stern competition from AT&T and Verizon, and users have preferred the call quality of AT&T to that of Vonage. Vonage is also not the cheapest VoIP service around in the marketplace.

Vonage has spent enormous amounts of their advertising budget dollars towards branding their VoIP Solution system. Vonage who is viewed as the leader of marketing still clings to its "Woo Hoo" song to grab the attention of millions of prospective service users. Vonage offers two basic plans to choose from, with their unlimited local and long distance service starting less than $25 a month for the end user.

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