Vonage Finally and a brief review

I am finally fully converted over to Vonage for my home phone service. Called RCN and they have successfully (two days later) removed my phone service. As a result I also downgraded my bundled service from RCN. Now I have the "power CI" package, cable plus internet. It costs $114 with tax !! Rediculous. I saved $47 from removing the phone service, and my basic Vonage service is costing me $17 with tax, so after all this work I saved $30. They offered me two different bundled. The CI package includes digital cable, which include G4TechTV and BBCA, Sundance and Indepence channel. The "Essential" package has everything up to channel 97, and it does not include the cable box. And in theory the "essential" package only have 5 megabyte download speed on the data side. There is a $20 difference between the packages. But if you add in the cable box, the difference is hardly worth it. And that's how they make money !! I can't wait to switch back to DSS.

Is it worth it to move to Vonage ? Of course ! Vonage also have more features. I now have my home phone set to forward on no-answer to my cellphone. I also get realtime activity report, and very cheap international long distance if I need to use it. Again, some hightlight of Vonage features are:

  • Call forwarding -- you can tell Vonage to forward any calls to your Vonage number to another number after some number of rings. For example, if I am not home, Vonage will eventually ring my cellphone.
  • Simultaneous ring -- This is a very cool feature that is also on my business Linx system -- When someone calls, you can have Vonage right both the phone at home and a second number at the same time. So you can give out one number, and answer either at home or with your cellphone. This is one good way to hide your cellphone number, for example.
  • Web voice mail -- any voice mail stored by the system is stored as wav files. You can listen/download them from their web interface, or
  • have Vonage email the voice mail as an attachment, to your own email account

For more information, read my long review here.