Matt blogs about Vonage and other VoIP services. I tried Vonage when I moved to the apartment where we’ve been for the last year and a half, but we decided to quit. At the time, we were having to pay for a phone line anyway, because we had DSL (no cable was available in the area). It was also a little buggy. We had to do resets way more often that I would have liked.
Now that we’re moving again, I signed up to try Vonage with our new area code. I’ve had the service working in my current apartment for several weeks now, and it seems to be pretty darned reliable. The dial tone is there, it works when I need it, and it even makes that super annoying sound when my cat knocks the phone off the hook. The only problem I had setting it up was my own problem — I had stuck the phone line into the wrong jack. Looking forward to getting it up and running for real in the new home.
As Matt says:
I hate to sound like an ad for the thing, but it’s just a better way of having a phone at home. The only real risk is an outage with your cable modem, and while that does happen from time to time, most people now have cell phones as a backup, and if your modem is out, calls go straight into voicemail.