My experience wtih VoIP

I was one of the early adopters of Vonage. What's odd is that I don't remember how I found out about them. I remember I was visiting my cousin and his wife in early 2003 and we had a brief conversation about services to call India. I thought I remembered my cousin's wife saying that she uses this service called Vonage to call her relatives. When I went home, I checked out http://www.vonage.com/ and found that it was a VOIP service, not a calling card service. When I mentioned this to my cousin's wife she said she never told me about Vonage?!?! I still don't know to this day how I found out about them.

When I saw their website, I became pretty impressed with their offering. But was their service really legit? I did some web research and dug up a lot of good reviews. I called Vonage customer service and asked them a lot of questions. At the time, the phone number portability laws were not in place, so to switch I had to change my phone number. I decided it was worth it since I would save so much money over what I was getting from my current provider.

I was loyal to Vonage for three years. I got a lot of my friends to join and was happy with their service. Even though many of my friends eventually switched to Sunrocket, I remained with Vonage since they were so reliable and switching would take some time and effort. However, I decided to make the switch to Sunrocket after Vonage botched their customer IPO share plan. No, I was not one of the people who bought Vonage shares at IPO price only to see them fall. I was one of the people who asked for a bunch of shares and got 0. It was a good thing that I got 0, but I was disappointed with Vonage for creating such a huge fiasco.

I was with Sunrocket for about 10 months. About 9 months in, I referred a colleague at work to them. One month after she signed up, she sent me an e-mail saying she tried calling their customer service only to get a message saying something like "We are sorry, but we are no longer accepting service calls" and how weird that was. I was busy so didn't respond to her immediately. She then sends me an article describing how about 200,000 customers are being shafted because Sunrocket is suddenly shutting down.

To make a long story short, I decided to switch back to Vonage. I went back to them instead of going to another VoIP provider because Vonage is a public company. I figured that if Vonage eventually dies like many predict they will, I will at least get a warning about it and will have time to switch to another provider.

However, I may not stick to Vonage for too long. I am excited about the possibility of switching to magicJack. They provide VOIP service through a USB port for $40/year. After the first year, that price is cut in half. The only reason I am waiting to make the switch is that they don't offer phone number portability yet.

When I had my land line, my phone bill would average something like $70/month. With Vonage, it is something like $26.50/month. If I sign up for magicJack, I would pay $3.33/month at first and then would pay $1.66/month. Is free phone service around the corner? I know there are many services like Skype that allow users to call each other for free. But I am talking about US residents being able to call any other US resident or even any other person in the world for free..............