Vonage and Beyond! Ditch your local telephone service…

October 12th, 2005

Another phone service that we have been looking into outside of our Virgin Mobile cell phone plan is Vonage.
It is basically making phone calls through your broadband internet connection (DSL/Cable).
(*note: this works better using Cable internet since to use DSL you need to subscribe for a local phone line, which will be a decrease in savings)

Our current setup:

Our traditional basic local phone service comes out to about $25/month (taxes included).
Plus, We have an additional account for long distance, as well as a calling card (this stinks).

The switch:

Vonage has a basic plan of $15/month for 500 minutes (long distance included)! And a $25 unlimited plan as well.

I couldn’t find any negatives yet:

• You keep your existing phone (they send you an adapter to hook up to your DSL or Cable modem)
• You keep your existing phone # (as of now my phone # is unavailable to switch over)
• Lots of enhanced calling features (3 way, caller ID, voicemail etc.)
• NO CONTRACT! and first month free

The savings:

We currently spend about $420/year for local/long distance.
If we stay under 500 minutes/month and use Vonage…. we only pay $180/year for local/long distance calling!

Stay tuned… I’ll let you know how it goes, first we need our calling area to become available so I don’t need to get a new phone #.
Some other companies that offer this type of VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) service are SunRocket and Comcast.

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