Wise Buddha

I have been using Vonage in Canada since September 2004 and overall have been pleased with the service and price. So much so that I kicked Telus out of the house and now my office, home and fax line are all provided by Vonage. The only problem is the recent power cut and when my ISP goes AWOL but that has been an irregular occurrence.

So I’m excited about a new service from Vonage in the UK - if you are a Vonage customer you can purchase a special cell phone and make Vonage calls in wi fi hot spots, when you are out of range the handset reverts to a regular cell phone and you are charged according to your plan. The great thing is that there is no extra charges for making Vonage calls via the hot spot. Read about it here. An alternative is to do what I do and download Skype to your notebook and use that in any free hot spot, you can look a bit of a geek sitting there with a headset on - like an extra from a call centre.

Living in Vancouver as I do I think the recent discussions about the City rolling out free wi fi (or low cost!) would make this a very cool way of having a cheap mobile device. Having said that I’ve come to realise one of the down sides of living in Vancouver and that is a good idea from conception to delivery can take years and a pile of stress - good luck to whoever takes this project on.