Evan Dodds – Non-work-related blog

Today is our “cut-over” day from Qwest telephone service to Vonage telephone service. I’ve been a faithful “proper telephone” (POTS) customer going back ages and ages to my BBS days, but it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

Qwest service was fine, etc. If they offered a Vonage-like service for the same price, I probably would have switched services rather than carriers.

That out of the way, I’m pretty excited about Vonage! For those of you not aware of the service, it’s a Voice-over-IP (Internet) telephone service. They provide you with a “box” you plug into your home network — ie, you have to already have broadband Internet service — and then you plug a regular telephone into that box. Ta da! You now have a VoIP telephone setup!

So, why switch? Well Vonage would have you believe that you’ll save tons of money. Some people probably do. We’re actually spending about $3 more per month for the service, not including the high-speed Internet we would have paid for anyways. We use our mobile phones for long distance calls and did without any of the bells-and-whistles offered by Qwest (for added $$).

What sold me was a couple of things that Qwest could not, or would not, provide:

1. Flat fee calling – I get unlimited local and long distance calls for a low price. This is the key selling point for lots of folks, I suspect, but not so much for me due to mobile phones.
2. Voicemail that comes into my email as an audio file – the old answering machine is now officially shut off, and I can get my home voicemails while I’m at work (so there’s still time during the day to call folks back!)
3. Flat fee INTERNATIONAL calling – this was a big selling point due to some family and friends over in the UK. Now we can stop buying calling cards and start calling right from the home phone. Very cool!
4. Ability to add a second number (or even a separate/second line) from any geographic area – if we decided we wanted to add a line for fax or for a home business or something it’s as easy as doing the configuration on the website.
5. Easy to manage through the website – their website is hella slow during the day sometimes, but it lets me review and modify just about anything about my account once I finally get in.

Ok, so that’s enough cool features for now. And I didn’t even get to the part about how you can bring your phone number with you wherever you are, whenever you move or travel, from that point on! Just plug in the box on a network and BAM, your live on the telephone network. Can you see I’m excited?

Maybe some day we’ll go to mobile-phone-only. But that day is a while off I think, since we still need to buzz people into our building, have a “shared line” for the two of us, and keep from giving out our mobile number to every vendor who requires a “home phone number” from us… Plus, Cingular (wireless) won’t send my voicemails to my email address either, so they have some catching up to do there!

Update - 2 hrs later – Whoops, I realize I left off a 6th reason that help to explain why a huge cheapskate like me would pay $3 more for their service. They throw in all the added-value services for free. Voicemail = Free, Caller ID = Free, etc, etc. Just like a mobile carrier. I pay $3/month more, but I get $20/month or more worth of features in Qwest’s pricing.