Vonage

Pros: Inexpensive, high "gee-whiz

Cons: Unreliable, Serious Customer Service Problems

Summary: While Vonage is inexpensive and you might save yourself some money over the course of the year, it fails at its basic mission: allowing consumer to make phone calls.

A. G. Bell invented the telephone over two centuries ago and Vonage is a great way to go back in time and experience those heady days in the late 1800s when making a phone call was a herculean task. You two can expereince the same sense of wonderment when Vonage actually works.

I've given it a fair shake for the past 6 months and Vonage has never been able to get my phone to the point of 1950s reliability. Frequently, the phone cuts-out for 10 or 15 seconds whereby callers on the other end cannot hear me, but I can hear them. This is a problem. Vonage's solution was to send me a whole new phone adapter, which would require me to go to UPS and ship my old adapter back to vonage at my expense. They declined to send me a prepaid mailer. The lack of good faith on Vonage's part was the straw that broke the caller's back.

Additionally, e-mail support is similarly inadequate. Of the four emails sent to Vonage, I got one response -- three weeks after my initial query.

While Vonage might be a neat gee-whiz-look-at-how-I-can-use-the-internet-to call-people experiment, it's a lousy way to make a phone call. Be smart and avoid Vonage for now. The company is undoubtedly on to something but let some other sucker tinker with it before making the switch -- unless you want to spend lots of time making friends with tech support buddy in Bombay, who, while good-natured knows little about getting Vonage to work.

You've been warned.