Run away from Vonage as fast as you can! Transfering your number over is an absolute nightmare and the customer service department just does not care. They tell you on the web-site that it takes 10-14 days, but it takes months. I switched to Vonage to have one lower phone bill and now I have two. You can't cancel your other phone company until it gets transfered over and Vonage keeps you in the dark paying both phone bills for as long as they can! Don't do it!

Service is good. Hardly any downtime to speak of. Good call quality. Customer service on the other hand, is absolutely 100% non-existant. 60-90 minute hold times are not unusual for Vonage's severely understaffed tech support department. Thank God I've only had to call once.

Vonage is a nightmare. Do NOT sign up for it. Rotten customer service -- on hold forever and then a person who is as dumb as a rock comes on and does not even know how to resolve the problem and does not care. Thick Indian accents with just about every service rep who answers. After 5 calls today, still no resolution. Terrible voice qulaity on even local calls and some calls won't go through at all. They make it real hard to cancel. Do NOT believe all the lies and hype in their informercials. Avoid!

Vonage is a nightmare. Do NOT sign up for it. Rotten customer service -- on hold forever and then a person who is as dumb as a rock comes on and does not even know how to resolve the problem and does not care. Thick Indian accents with just about every service rep who answers. After 5 calls today, still no resolution. Terrible voice qulaity on even local calls and some calls won't go through at all. They make it real hard to cancel. Do NOT believe all the lies and hype in their informercials. Avoid!

Useless. Terrible reliablility. Salesperson lied about the service to get me to sign up. After one week, about half of my calls have been dropped after 2-3 minutes. I have another internet phone in the house from charter, and it works perfectly.

Useless. Terrible reliablility. Salesperson lied about the service to get me to sign up. After one week, about half of my calls have been dropped after 2-3 minutes. I have another internet phone in the house from charter, and it works perfectly.

Useless. Terrible reliablility. Salesperson lied about the service to get me to sign up. After one week, about half of my calls have been dropped after 2-3 minutes. I have another internet phone in the house from charter, and it works perfectly.

Vonage is, quite simply, a horrible phone service. If you want a service that often doesn't work ("Our engineers are aware of the problem," is a message you'll see often) and a customer service center that is often not avaliable, this is your kind of company. Trust me and some of the other reviewers here, you'll regret choosing them.

We asked Vonage not to cut off our regular phone service and called back 7xs to ensure that we would have service in our home, and they decided to send an early disconnection to our phone comapny after this. We received their equipment and it does not work, so now we are out of phone service until they can get another device out to us (its Thurs they will ship on Monday and shipping takes 5-7 days). Go figure. Do not change to them they are horrible. If you don't think that is bad, try calling them, the wait is a min of 30 minutes. I have waited on hold for over an hour before. Trust me your service is much better until they get the cracks out of their service.

"We're not hanging up on you, sir, our phoens are just dropping some of our calls." - Vonage 2 weeks, no device, no update about why I haven't received my advice. 6 calls later, I discovered they placed my order incorrectly (I ordered over the phone), and that they need me to cancel my order and try again. OH WAIT! No, they can send me what I asked for! Hours waiting on the phone, being hung up on, and all the agitation and frustration and they will grant me the ability to get what I had initially asked for! GREAT! See this review on every site I can place it. Vonage is bad rubbish, may it live short and crumble.

We signed up for the service and never received the device needed to get the phone service working. We were promised a certain date and two weeks later still wasn't here. We talked to customer service and they blamed it on the delivery service and vice versa. We were finally told it was on back order. I would NOT recommend this service to anyone!!!

it was HORRIBLE. after looking through bazillions of reviews, i switched to Sunrocket. 500% better. they gave me two free phones with the refer a friend deal, and the phones ROCK, they're not even cheap like i expected. Service went down for a few hours and they gave everyone 25 "rocket rewards" which gave me a $25 gift certificate to Amazon. i LOVE sunrocket. boo to vonage. if you want to join and get free phones, you can use my code if you want: 6177620169 free fast shipping of everything, no downtime that i've noticed, clear as day service. hooray!

There were a few criteria that helped me to choose Vonage, versus other providers. Criteria: 1. ** Mobility ** When I travel with family, we'd like a system we can travel with. Vonage allows us to carry the small router, plugging in to a broadband connection in a hotel or friend's home, and to a telephone (fixed/portable phone), and make a call as if we were back in North America. That's a big plus. 2. ** Laptop Calls ** If I chose not to bring my router, but want to make a call from my laptop, that I had the option to do it. Vonage offers a softphone, that I can install on my laptop, along with a Virtual Number, to call out and receive calls via my headset. 3. ** Full Featured Services ** Its real handy to have all the services that a local telephone provider offers, ie. call waiting, call forwarding, caller id etc, and not be punished just because its new technology. Vonage offers all regular features plus other advanced ones. I do like the SimulRIng feature, that rings to my cell phone and home phone, when someone calls my Vonage number. This allows me to pick up the call even when I'm out of home. 4. ** Easy to install, User-friendly, ** Other VOIP systems require you to be a rocket scientist to make the system work. With Vonage, I installed the CD, plugged in the router and the telephone line, and made calls within 20 minutes. I really like that! Plus the web control panel for administering my features and options was very user-friendly. 5. ** Price ** I didn't want to spend an arm and a leg to take advantage of this technology. I wanted it to provide convenience, while saving money. Vonage offered me an unlimited call plan for $25, waiving the setup fee and first month fee. That's reasonable. I've since added a local virtual number that routes to my main vonage number, for an extra $4.95/month. In summary, Vonage offered me flexibility, functionality, and a service that meets my needs. Plus I'm excited to know they will be launching a mobile VOIP phone (and video phone) that will allow me to make N. American calls when I'm a hotspot via WIFI. This takes it to the next level. I can just imagine a bunch of people on their WIFI phones at the local Starbucks, calling away without a care in the world {grin}. If you want to enjoy a free month on Vonage, send me an email to vonage@shermanhu.com, with your email address, and I'll send you a refer-a-friend referral notice through email via Vonage. I do benefit also. Vonage also offers me 2 free months of service, when a referral subscribes. Its a win-win. Plus you can offer that to friends and family, and we can all benefit from paying-it-forward. UPDATED REVIEW (SEPT 22,2005): Reading all the reviews in this section, it really looks like there are more Cons to using Vonage, than Pros. Actually quite shocking, as I haven't had these major issues that the others have experienced. I have the occasional drop call when I pick up the line, or it just simply drops after a long conversation with a client/friend, but its not a common occurence. Bottom line, its VOIP. I understand that I'm using VOIP technology, and give it some grace. I just checked my last bill, and I used 1131 minutes this last month, on the $25/m plan. If I had used this much time from Canada to my US clients or friends, I would've paid an arm and a leg to my local provider for it. So you know I'm not sold on Vonage, I also do use Skype, SkypeOut, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk too. I do use alot of Skype also, but Vonage also comes in very handy when I need it. Cheers, and I hope you enjoy your Vonage service like I do. Sherman

Absolutely pathetic, totally unacceptable and embarassing call quality. I have a very reliable high speed connection and use Skype now instead; which for some reason is crystal clear and reliable. I use Skype now for international business without thinking twice. Customer service is less than useless. A complete thief of time. Perhaps they should allocate some of the obscene marketing budget to actaully improving their service. What is ever more delicious is reading these reviews and finding that vonage reps have been posting the same sales pitch 'the good the bad' in itemized lists. Their changing the font and format of posting is reminiscent of grade schoolers handing in the same report with a different title page. Please. Just forget it until the tech and service improve. Use Skype or Yahoo for exotic international calls and keep your standard land line for everything else. Remeber that if they also have skype, you can speak for FREE, peer to peer. The frustration of Vonage isn't nearly worth the marginal savings.Absolutely pathetic, totally unacceptable and embarassing call quality. I have a very reliable high speed connection and use Skype now instead; which for some reason is crystal clear and reliable. I use Skype now for international business without thinking twice. Customer service is less than useless. A complete thief of time. Perhaps they should allocate some of the obscene marketing budget to actaully improving their service. What is ever more delicious is reading these reviews and finding that vonage reps have been posting the same sales pitch 'the good the bad' in itemized lists. Their changing the font and format of posting is reminiscent of grade schoolers handing in the same report with a different title page. Please. Just forget it until the tech and service improve. Use Skype or Yahoo for exotic international calls and keep your standard land line for everything else. Remeber that if they also have skype, you can speak for FREE, peer to peer. The frustration of Vonage isn't nearly worth the marginal savings.

Horrible, I lose service EVERY time there is an electrial strom. The router can't handle any strees and have been replaced 6 times. The costumer service blows and run you around in circles and can never solve the problem so they just send another router to replace the broken one, mean while you have no phone for a few days while you wait for the replacement router, Horrible, this technology will never replace the regular phone company....

If you are residential, have a single line and have ultra-reliable broadband, its doable. But don't even think about using it in a business environment. For starters, the fax line is unreliable. They offer NO DIRECTORY SERVICE! If somebody calls information and askes for a listing for your business, they WON'T get it. I have spoken with industry professionals and according to them, Vonage COULD share your information with various directory services, free of charge (i.e. Yellow Book) if they chose to...they simply don't choose to. Next, cancelling service is a living nightmare. These people will keep your account alive as long as humanly possible. They put you on hold, tell you that you have to speak with an account specialist but one isn't available, then they offer to call back, so you accept. When they call back, you're not available but they WON'T talk to ANYBODY except the person whos name is on the account, so they hang up and you have to try to call THEM back, and start the entire miserable cycle all over again. Meanwhile, you get another Vonage charge on your credit card. These people know exactly what they are doing. This whole cancellation process is by design so they can milk you for as much money as possible.

Call quality is appalling, there are lots of call drops and static. Most times you cannot hear what the person at the other end is saying or they do not hear you. The most annoying is that when you call the customer support service line, they take about 30 to 45 minutes to answer your call. They always blame call volume. Even when they answer, in so many cases you get through to people who are not very knowlegable about the technology they are selling. I have since disconnected my line with Vonage and would seriously advise people not to sign up for this crappy service. Don't do it!

Couldn't be more pleases with this product. Voice quality is betteer than the land line we had. Running on a 2.8 ghz machine and Cable modem. Ed

Never said that won't work with Tivo. Can't fax off of my computer because of low rate and becomes de-registered fro no good reason. Went back to verizon.

Customer Service is terrible. Hours and hours on hold waiting to talk to a human. Product is OK. Sound quality is barely acceptable.

Good news: it works ... most of the time, and the free stuff: call waiting, voice mail etc. Bad news: EXTREMELY unreliable customer service. Expect to be on hold for up to 20 minutes to talk to a representative. Also -- no 911, strange response to toll-free numbers, you get a busy signal the first few times, then have to redial. Also, I do have a high-speed cable connection, and still, every once in a while I get a terribly choppy connection where people can hear me, but I hear only every other syllable of what the person on the other end is saying. So: 90% of the time it works great, but for the extreme cases -- like emergencies -- when you really need to have it be reliable, I can't say it has been there.

I use it and it is great! I have never had a problem with their service it is wonderful. You must have a highspeed internet like Cable or DLS or T1. The cool thing is last year I forwarded my calls to my cell, drove to Texas. When I got to my parents house (they have Cablemodem) I plugged in my box to their router and unforwarded my calls to my cell and was able to recieve and make calls for FREE while on vacation, just like I was at home. They now have a $14.95 Basic plan to a $34.95 unlimited plan. Cut and paste this link, by clicking this link you will get one month free when you sign in from it. Their affiliate progran offer! See http://www.vonage.com/?refer_id=vegasbuffets

GET IT. The good: - Unlimited local and long distance for ~$40/month including Canada. - Cheap international rates. Check vonage.com for details. - you can check your voice mail over any phone, on the internet, voice mails can be downloaded, voice mails can be E-MAILED to an address you provide. - You can specify the options for call forwarding to any phone number you provide. You can provide a forward to number in case your ISP is down, or in the case of an unaswered call. - You can use any phone you want. Vonage sends you a Cisco box that handles the connections to make it exactly liek a normal phone. - You can take your Cisco box with you if you travel and calls will be routed to the phone plugged into it (given it's on a network) - You can keep your old phone number if you switch from an encumbant provider - You can get ANY area code you want. - Digital phone quality is so much better than regular phone service. All of the above is free with the ~$40/month cost. You will also need a router if you don't already have one. Vonage offers a good netgear four port for a reasonable price. The bad: - If you need an always on phone, your uptime will only be as good as your ISP (for me not a problem). - If you are used to having multiple jacks throughout your house you will need to re-think how to place your phones. I plug a phone cord splitter into my Cisco box, then out of one I plug in one of those expandable base phones that you can add wireless phones to (that do not need to be plugged into a phone jack). And in the other I plug in a typical 2.4 Ghz wireless phone.