The Vonage company offered me a free account for use during the production and marketing of my book Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones. Since the book’s long finished and the radio interviews have pretty well stopped, I decided to get my own account and transfer my home office line from SBC/AT&T to Vonage.
Switching your number from one of the traditional telephone companies can almost always (about 99% success rate) be done, but I caution everyone to expect the switch to take at least two weeks. Readers tell me they’ve waited as long as a month for their switch.
My number transferred over within a week. In fact, I hadn’t even hooked up my new Vonage router in place of my old Vonage router when the switch occurred.
I did all that this morning. The Quick Start Guide did a good job showing how to use the Vonage router (a special Linksys model customized with phone plugs) by itself as your sole network router, and how to plug it into an existing router you planned to keep. Plugs and cables are color coded, making the process about as simple as plugging in a few cables and calling a Vonage 800 number to verify service activation.
If broadband phones don’t make huge jumps in market share, it won’t be because the degree of difficulty remains high. The Vonage installation experience was about as difficult as plugging a USB device into a modern computer: not difficult at all.
i too switched recently from verizon land-line to vonage's service, and like you, experience GREAT turnaround on the install, in fact i had mine up and running in less than 2 hours after i purchased my router from circuit city!
trouble is... their utterly deplorable customer service telephone service. holy sh*t is it bad. too many people who do not speak even 90% english, and other who just do not get what you are saying. i literally had to walk the tech support rep through my issues to get it fixed. so yes, basically i coulda just not called, and the same outcome woulda happened. my own fix during the call to them, fixed it, nothing of what she suggested worked.
anyway, i like the service, and the quality of the service, but i do everything i can to avoid calling there. three weeks after i was up and running i had to talk to someone in level 2 tech support, and the english got WAY better, and that was a relief. so maybe its just the level one support that is that way, but... caveat emptor!
During my book research, I visited Vonage at their headquarters in New Jersey. They had two floors full of sales/support people. I didn't find out how many were sales and how many support, not did I find out if they outsourced the first line of phone support, which I'm pretty sure they do.
Glad you got up and running.
Want free service? Vonage is the best company for rewarding referrals - if you send them a customer, they give you two months free service. Sign up 6 friends and you talk free for a year.
James