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..............

Tom Brady

I don't watch very many professional sports league regular season games anymore. But I have tried to catch New England football games to watch Tom Brady. I am not only amazed by what a ridiculously spectacular season he is having (38 TD's with only 4 INT's), but also by the ease with which he seems to be putting up his great numbers.

In the games I watched him play against the Bills and the Redskins, it looked as if he was able to pile up his stats so easily without much effort. During so many situations in which most quarterbacks would worry about defenders coming to sack them, Brady was able to take one or two simple steps and focus on getting his pass down field.

Tom Brady is on pace to smashing records for touchdown passes in a season and quarterback rating. It is difficult to compare athletes in different sports, but in my 20+ years of following sports, I cannot think of any professional athlete who has dominated his position the way Tom Brady has dominated at quarterback this year.