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stars
"Don't think about leaving them..." on by costas
Pros: Web features
Cons: Low call quality; overcharging you when disconnecting service
Summary: Contrary to CNET's review, their voice quality is low.
There is also echo, which their FAQ attributes to not using Panasonic phones (I was using a Panasonic device).
Even if you are unlucky the previous user of your new phone number to have been a "popular" person they will not change your assigned phone number, in which case prepare for several late night disturbing phone calls.
I was with them for two months yet still they were not able to switch my SBC number to Vonage.
Once I decided to cut my loses and disconnected, they overcharged me (they even took back a discounted month they had already offered).
I wish I had never joined them.
- 21 replies to this review
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7 years later and I have the exact same story! Only I'm the sorry sap who has to say they overcharged me 18 months! That's over $1000 and they refuse to pay it back, because I should have been paying attention to my credit card bill. Unfortunately, I don't receive the break down of that...long story short...I told them to close my account effective 07-01-10 and I recently found out they have been tapping my card each month averaging $60/mo. No activity whatsoever on those numbers except for the usual wrong numbers on the 866 one which had a number off from a porn site. ugh. The worse business experience ever. Courteous but most inefficient staff I've ever met. I am not cutting my loses however. Over $1000! Don't give them your card number they latch on and won't let you drop.
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horrific service... I had the same echo and I didn't have a Panasonic phone. We had high speed cable internet and it took up so much bandwith that we were unable to stream anything until we changed vonage's priority in the router settings and then the calls were impossible to hear. Don't even get me started about trying to disconnect service. Have made 4+ phone calls to disconnect... 3 resulted in the call being dropped after 15 minutes of holding. The 4th call resulted in a customer service rep stating that they couldn't perform disconnects because of a system upgrade and requested that I call back at a later time. DO NOT use them... they are the worst provider I have ever dealt with.
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I recieved an e-mail Vonage stating that my usage history was indicative of a "small buisness". The e-mail stated that I was using over 5,000 minutes per month and that was inconsistent usage for residential service (meaning as a residential customer you cannot go over 5,000 minutes per month).
The e-mail stated that if I did not contact them within 72-hours regarding this matter that my service would be either suspended or automatically up-graded to a "small buisness account", which would in turn raise my rates from $34 a mo. to $49.99 per month. I contacted them back via e-mail and also spoke with them over the phone to no avail.
I felt forced to up-grade, as I could not afford the interruption in my service.
This is false advertisement as Vonage clearly states in every commercial as well as on their website that you get UNLIMITED CALLING but fail to mention that you DO NOT GET UNLIMITED USAGE. -
I should see this long time ago when I sign up it. Now I am really suffering from leaving them.
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Yes. This was my same experience. They are AWFUL!
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I had Vonage for2 years for my Home Office. After the first year, I decided to move my main home line. I had moved from Verizon Voicwing, you wanna talk about bad service, try them! Port, no problem, quality, no problem, features were great. After a year with my home service, I decided to go to ATT call vantage and get better deal for two lines, cell service bundle. Vonage ported out both numbers to ATT no problems whatsoever. After a year with CallVantage, I had quality issues intermittently and the blamed my ISP (Verizon FIOS Fiber 20 MB down/5 MB up). They claimed my ping was high, but I tested it it was 5 ms to most servers. They basically said I just had to live with it. I liked some of their features, but they don't have near as many as Vonage and their customer portal is not as good, so I decided to go back to Vonage, despite all of these poor ratings.My main home number was ported back to Vonage from CallVantage in 13 days total from order. No problems, everything OK.
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With regard to number portability, you have to keep in mind that it isn't Vonage that is at fault in most cases. It's your former telco. <br><br>They incumbent telcos drag their feet with transfers to Vonage, reason being they can take all the time they want since Vonage isn't an FCC regulated service. <br><br>Secondly, the quality settings on your ATA are controlled by you, not Vonage. If you're only running at 56kbps you're going to notice issues. <br><br>As to leaving them, it's pretty simple. Record the call and inform them that you're doing so. Then call your credit card company and reject all charges from them.
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Vonage Sales never explained to me that I may need outside installation. As a result, when I got the service, only one of my three phones were activated. We had to run downstairs to get the phone. Also, the internet was slowed down to a third of its normal speed.<br>It wasn't until I finally called to cancel my service that they offered me a one month extension on my free service so I could give them the estra time to resolve their problams.<br>Finally, beware of getting your number back. I am still not sure whether Comcast installers can activate my number on the instllation day inspite of the hours I spent trying to have my number ported back.
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I was with Vonage for 11 months. I bought the best phone I could find and I have the fastest internet connection available. Some days I would not be able to use my phone at all (no dial tone) even though my internet was working. I always experienced choppy, garbled audio. I sounded like a "robot" to callers on the other end. I always had to unplug my modem and plug it back in to see if I could get a better connection. I was constantly using my cell phone minutes to make up for the fact that my main phone didn't work. My neighbors have vonage too and they have the same problems. However, they forward their calls to their cell phone when their vonage line is down - what a pain!<br><br>Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. After several calls to tech support (on hold and talking to people with thick accents), I hung it up with Vonage 1 month before my contract ran out. I paid about $39 for cancelling before the contract was over. Also, near the end my bills were inconsistent. Weird! I now pay $50 a month for unlimited long distance and local (with caller ID and call waiting) through AT & T. <br><br>The only thing I miss is the phone - I actually liked the phone.
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I've had Vonage for close to two years now and I can tell you the following:<br><br>- Voice quality is very good and NO echo what so ever.<br>- Reliability is about 98%. In two years Vonage signal has only be gone about twice.<br>- Your comment about Panasonic phones is not true. I've used it with 3 different Panasonic models and no problems. I've also used GE, VTech, AT&T, Fax Machines and many other phones and no problems there.<br>- I have 3 family members and 1 friend who use Vonage and they are pretty happy with it as well.<br>- Switching to my existing phone took longer than expected but you gotta understand that Vonage does not have complete control over timelines pertaining to this process.<br>- Honestly if you have a reliable Internet connection you should take a close look to this service.
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I have had Vonage for 4 months and have had nothing but repeated prohblems with connection issues as well as echoeing, and broken calls. After 6 attempts to resolve it with they're technical support group (standard and advanced) with no resolution. I have also had my local cable internet provider technician to my home a documented 7 times with a result of the ISP being fine. I called to disconnect the service and not only did they NOT want to credit me for the 4 months of sporadic service I have paid for they also wanted me to pay a $90 disconnect fee. The customer support person refered to a "buying an automobile" analogy stating they would not take it back. Lol dont know where they are from (Im assuming Philippines) as that is where ALL your customer service and tech support issues are directed, but where I live there is whats called a "lemon law" where if you buy an automobile and the warrenty work CANNOT fix it you may return it! Anyways horrible experience! Do your research before signing on with these clowns!
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My husband lost his job and we had to diconnect. They are charging us $98 to disconnect and we were just billed $31.99 for 2 days of service, no pro-rating, NOTHING.. Worst service ever... Two tin cans and string would have been better.
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Ripoff! Overcharged for service, poor customer service and a $40 fee to disconnect!
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The bills keep coming and the free month is rescinded and fulll charges charged on equipment (even if returned in original condition) and even if you found the service totally unacceptable and even if you try to cancel within 30 days.
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don't blame Vonage for porting issues. It usally your current phone company who is taking there time. The phone companies do not want to loose your servce so they drag their feet in porting your number, making it look like vonages'fault. The only thing vonage probably should do is get more aggressive when asking for a number to be ported. Some regulation should also be in place that says a number must be porting within a certain amount of time of the request.
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I have Vonage and a Panasonic and use it every day. The calls are clear as a bell and nobody knows that I have Vonage unless I tell them.
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An unbiased evaluation:<br><br>You get what you pay for. Vonage would be ok for me as a second phone in house but no way am I giving up my POTS for it. I have comcast cable with about 400K bps upload speed and 1.1Mbps download speed. I have the phone adapter before my house router to take advantage of the quality of call service by the phone adapter. <br><br>I've had it just over a week. It is fairly reliable but just not good enough for me to trust it when I need to call home and get a hold of the wife or kids. The quality is usually good but two folks I have called so far have indicated that they hear a slight echo. Also, I lost a connection 3 times with someone in California today. Since I am still evaluating Vonage, I still have my POTS coming into house on an alternate line so I was able to continue my converation on a real phone system. I continued my conversation on my normal POTS phone from Comcast for the next hour without further incident.<br><br>Get Vonage as your primary or only phone if reliability is not your primary considerations. The price is greata and the call quality is generally pretty good. If I lived alone, I might just go with Vonage as my only phone. If you have a family or relish real 911, then go with POTS.<br><br>The cost for POTS system is about $49 for unlimited calls, ACR, and unlisted number. I think the cost for Vonage will be about $28 or so after taxes and fees (have not been billed since this is my first month). The POTS is worth the additional $21 to me. Might be to you as well.<br><br>I enquired with Comcast about their VOIP system that they are rolling out. It is pricey at $49 plus taxes and fees but comes with many features just like Vonage and others. They indicated that the packets travel over their own internal backbone rather than public routers. This may be a big advantage is true as privacy of the voip packets is a big concern for me. Does anyone have any info on this?
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Dude, hate to tell you this, but this sounds like a result of your Internet provider, not Vonage. I've been with Vonage over a year now and people always comment about how incredibly clear my calls are. I have no special configuration either. Free router Vonage provides, and 3 generic phones (2 cordless, 1 corded). I have run into a couple of people that have had troubles with "Vonage" and when I helped them out and investigated the problems, I found both times it was not Vongage at all, but poor service quality of a DSL line. I use cable so I haven't had those problems. Local copper for many DSL lines is in such bad shape it's a wonder it works at all. Of course, getting the phone company to do anything about it is the hard part. It's easy to test though. Find someone else with broadband (prefferably Cable, or someone in another part of town if it's DSL) and take your router and a phone over to their house, plug it in, and make some calls to see what happens. If it works fine, there's your sign!
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I have had vonage for a few months now. I have not had any major problems with them. The only issue I see at this point is the long wait time to talk directly to a CSR. I think I was on hold at one point for 20 min. I understand it is in part due to the popularity of their product with new customers. If they are able to hire more CSR's to alleviate the response time to no more then 2-3 minutes, I would give them a complete 5 stars. I recommend them to all my family and friends looking to change their phone service. I pay far less with the added features then I ever paid with a land-line w/o long distance. I give em 4 stars!<img border="0" src="http://www.cnet.com/i/mb/emoticons/happy.gif" alt=":)">
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I have the service for a year no problems and sounds clear , but i do have motorola box <br>no ecco what so ever.. Clear and I wont change ,,<br>good luck connecting you other device...<br><br>Alex
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First stay away from vonage crummy support, long waits for customers service from India and I never got my number ported. As for quility it was pretty good. Now what I did before I cancled was called BofA and explained that I wanted to stop my automatic withdrawl and they asked why I explained my delema they never ported my number did not live up to their contract.So not only did they waved the stop charge (like 35 bucks) but they also credit my account another two months of service, the reason I did that was so when I canceled they "Vonage" could not debit my account. Well when I did cancel the idiots credit back the $49.00 cancelation fee that they never charged me. It nice get them back sometimes when they been screwing you.
