Vonage no more
March 29th, 2006Yesterday, I cancelled my Vonage subscription.
This means that we no longer have a home phone, now we’ll be at the mercy of our cellphone carriers. =)
After almost 4 years of Vonage service, I decided not to continue with them.
Please, make no mistake, I strongly believe they are one of the best things that have ever happened to Broadband, since Broadband.
Being someone that moved away from my home country, you carry a big responsibility of keeping, or trying to keep, in touch with people you leave, like family and friends.
You research, try, and then in the end, marry to certain ideas on how to save money in long distance… more so, international long distance. When I first moved to the United States, it would be normal to pay around 40 to 60 cents to call Mexico through a land line. Not pretty if you start adding up the minutes you spend on the phone with mom, friends, and so on. think that if you talked for 20 minutes, $12 were gone… That’s probably half of what you currently pay for a very very basic phone line through a local carrier.
After a few months… I got hi-speed internet access, then a few options opened… Net2Phone was one of the very first things I started to use to call Mexico, you had to use a dorky headset but the very cool thing about it is that they had a calling card type of thing, you’d dial an 800 number, enter your account information, and then enter the number you were trying to reach… At this point I was probably spending about 30 cents per minute… not bad… But they didn’t have the best customer service… no, they didn’t have customer service.
Something was still missing…
Then my cellphone company, AT&T Wireless at the time, started to offer a discounted service to Mexico for a fixed monthly fee. They charged about 5 bucks a month, and around 25 cents per minute… so far it was the best thing you could have, because: you didn’t have to be at the computer, if you were not close to a computer, you didn’t have to use a calling card… actually you could use the service whenever, and wherever you wanted. And after paying 60 cents a minute, 25 is a huge bargain. I was happy.
Then, I stumbled upon an article somewhere while surfing the internet… it was talking about this new company, that was offering a VoIP phone service, with no need of using the computer (simultaneously) to make calls, no headset, no 800-numbers, no calling card, and best of all, you could use ANY phone device made for home use.
When I first started using Vonage, the calls to Mexico were around 18 cents per minute. This explains why I was so happy with the service. I went hi-tech with one of the companies that would see growth in the following years at an amazing rate.
This guys were doing so great that after some time, my monthly fee went from only 19.99 to 14.99… yes, 14.99, they were doing so great that they decided to drop the monthly service fee from 19.99 to 14.99. I am sorry but I have never ever been in such situation before.
Granted, the reason why they did this is because they reduced their 3-tier service to a 2-tier, but even then, the benefit went to their customers. for 14.99 you’d get 500 outgoing minutes to anywhere in the United States, then it expanded to Canada, and then Puerto Rico. The top of the line Residential tier had a cost of 24.99, with an unlimited usage throughout the country.
Of course all this was with all the cool things such as Voicemail, caller ID, call forward, simultaneous ring (my home phone rang, my cell phone rang), Voicemail retrieval through web, pretty cool.
In September of 2004, they hit me with another great service, which they were already offering at a national level: Virtual Phone Number.
The Virtual Phone Number, enabled you to have a phone number anywhere in the United States. If I lived in Minnesota, and all my family lived in, say, California, I could get a phone number with a California area code, and it will of course ring in Minnesota… this so they didn’t have to pay for long distance. The cost? an extra 4.99 a month. And since all these were incoming calls… they were unlimited.
But, my family and friends didn’t live in California. They lived in Mexico City. So they had the amazing idea of providing virtual phone numbers for Mexico City. What this meant was that everyone that wanted to get a hold of me in Mexico City, they would just need to dial a local phone number, and the phone would start ringing at my home, in Minnesota. The cost? well, uhh… 4.99 a month… And since these were going to be incoming calls… they were unlimited.
Sexy.
After all these years the cost per minute to Mexico has been dropping… with Vonage (6 Cents), and with some other companies, including my cellphone company (T-Mobile - 5 Cents through their 4.99-a-month International Long Distance to Mexico discount program).
Also, my conferences to Mexico were getting shorter, and were not happening that often. averaging 30 minutes per week.
If you do the math and then add to the equation that my conferences to Mexico were my main reason to keep Vonage (besides the loyalty and respect that I feel for them), I had not-too-strong reasons to continue to use Vonage as my long-distance carrier. Adding the discounted long distance program to my cell phone is a more cost effective situation.
Thank you Vonage for your great service and awesome savings that you gave me through these 4 years.
It was a tough decision, a good thing is that I have to use your service again, I’ll be very very glad to do so, and I’ll rest assured that you will provide a quality service, that could be even better than when I left.
