Why I Hate Vonage
Hate is a strong word I know BUT in the case of Vonage I think I can justify my feelings. I was an early adopter and signed up in September 2004, since then I transferred my home number and a fax line. I am now throwing in the towel and slowly but surely getting Vonage out of my life - why? Here are my top 5 reasons why I hate Vonage -
1. They have done nothing whatsoever to instill a sense of community, membership or customer service in me. The only time I ever hear from them is when they are updating their terms and conditions or asking me to refer a friend.
2. If you have any kind of home network that involves slightly more than plugging your modem into the Vonage router then you are frankly screwed because they fall back on blaming your ‘complicated’ home network for pretty much anything that goes wrong. I have a wired and wireless network and my 2 Vonage routers are plugged directly into my gigabit switches - chatting to Vonage tech support you’d think that this set up constituted the same level of complexity as Nasa must have experienced developing the Apollo program.
3. Vonage customer service is a bunch of arse. I know as I estimate that I have chatted with them for over 15 hours over the last couple of years.
4. The fax service just doesn’t work unless you can plug the machine directly into the router and then tweak all the settings to Vonage specs - just don’t bother.
5. Please Vonage don’t try and fool us into believing that you are now a cause worth supporting - some kind of David v Goliath tale for our 2.0 stylee times. The amount of cash you’ve burned and I still can’t store my telephone numbers on my account page - even Skype lets me do that for free.
Talking of Skype - I’ve been using it for longer than Vonage so I now use Skype for all my calls - $30 for a year unlimited in North America. I’m not sure what that does to the Vonage business plan but rats and sinking ships comes to mind.