Vonage is one of those VoIP services that is specialized to provide their customers with only VoIP options. This has served them well in recent years as they have risen through the ranks to become one of the best VoIP services in the industry, earning them our TopTenREVIEWS Bronze Award. The main draw of Vonage is the fact they don’t keep any features from the customers who are unable to afford their most expensive plans. This makes it possible for customers who are on a budget to be able to enjoy the full scope of Vonage’s capabilities without having to worry about being shortchanged or having to go up to a more expensive plan because of a lack of features.
This service offers four different plans: Pro, World, Basic 500 minutes and Lite. These plans have prices ranging anywhere from $9.99 to $34.99 per month with a 1-year agreement. Pro and World come with unlimited local and long distance calling in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico while the Basic 500 Minutesplan comes with 500 long distance minutes (3.9¢ per additional minute) and the Lite plan gives you 200 minutes (3.9¢ per additional minute). You can call 60 countries for free with the World plan and five countries with the Pro plans. Oddly enough, the less expensive World plan is the one that gives you the option to call more countries for free.
While their competitors in VoIP services offer a varying feature set for each of their plans, this service gives you the full set of features for each plan they have to offer. Every Vonage plan comes with a 30-day money back guarantee. All Vonage plans except for Lite come with Unlimited 411 Directory Assistance. When it comes to unlimited readable voicemail, customers who have the Pro and World plans get it, but Basic 500 Minutes and Lite customers don’t. Pro gives you the chance to download software onto your computer that will allow you to receive and make calls from anywhere.
A drawback with their plans comes in the fact they offer all of their features with every plan. This is great for the customers that pay for the least expensive plan, but a definite drawback for those who have purchased the pricier options. Another shortcoming of this service is the fact you’re required to enter into 1-year agreement. It would be lovely if they had an option where customers were able to pay from month to month.
Vonage offers customers over 20 different features if they decide to choose them as their service provides. Some of these features include: Caller ID with Name, Call Waiting, Call Transfer, SimulRing, 3-Way Calling, Caller ID Block, Call Return, Anonymous Call Block and Repeat Dialing. This list is a mere sampling of the features this service actually has to offer. When you look at the list, a few additional features are included to artificially inflate their feature set. Once you get a list that’s indicative of what this service has to offer, you’re not going to be disappointed. We would like to see them narrow down their list into a consolidated format that tells their potential customers exactly what they’re going to get from the service.
A couple interesting features this service includes in their plans are SimulRing, Ring Lists and Bandwidth Saver. SimulRing allows you to have multiple phones ringing at the same time when you’re at a different location. Ring Lists are lists of numbers that your Virtual and Toll Free Plus numbers can be directed to. You can go about using this feature in one of three ways: sequential (goes through the list one at a time), random dialing (dials any number at random) and BlastMe (dials all of the numbers on the list at once).
Setting up services with Vonage is easy. It’s a simple, three step process. First, you have to connect the Vonage Phone Adapter to your existing high speed internet connection. Next, you connect the phone you want to use into the Vonage Phone Adapter. Finally, all you have to do is pick up the phone and you’re going to have service. Other VoIP services should take a page from the Vonage installation handbook.
The basis of Vonage’s help and support options is their frequently asked questions section, which is broken up into several different categories, such as getting started, managing your account, billing and troubleshooting. The troubleshooting section is especially helpful because it allows you to look at solutions to a number of common problems. You can also browse the Vonage Customer Forums, view their online video tutorials, take advantage of Vonage Mobile Support and follow them on Twitter. You can email or call this service. It usually takes them 12 hours to respond to emails while their phone line is operational 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
You aren’t going to have a hard time enjoying the benefits you get from choosing this service. The fact they had full feature sets for all of their plans was great, but it was a little discouraging to see that they didn’t offer anything in terms of additional features for the customers that pay more for extra things to justify the price they charge for the more expensive plans. The lack of a month-to-month option served to knock Vonage down even further. If they were to improve these two things, they wouldn’t have any competition among all the VoIP services.
