How well does Vonage work in Toronto?

May 19, 2005 2:37 PM

Any Canadian Mefites use Vonage (http://www.vonage.ca) for their phone service? How's the reception? Uptime? Any details you can share? Any nightmares? Details specific to Toronto or Rogers Hi-Speed appreciated.
posted by Badmichelle to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Have Vonage in Vancouver, with Shaw high speed, results:

1. Customer Service - 10/10 - amazing, slick, easy, have yet to talk to a person there, everything done online.

2. Phone Service - 7/10 - have had Vonage for about 8 months now and have had a couple occasions of funny behavior, usually fixed by waiting a few minutes or resetting the Vonage modem.

3. Sound Quality - 8/10 - I'd say call quality is about 85% as good as landline. Also, if I am downloading/uploading a lot of large files (I mean a lot, like over 150k/s) the calls break up, but I just pause the download until the call is done. You can move the Vonage modem to the internet side of your router and it will then prioritize call traffic, unfortunatly this hurt internet download speeds whether the phone was in use or not.

4. Extra Features - 20/10 - Simply amazing, it's the extras that make Vonage so cool, I LOVE being able to have my work phone, cell phone, wife's work phone and wife's cell phone all ring at the same time as the Voange phone when someone calls us, that way everyone only needs to know one number and we can be reached at any time. Being able to see all your call data online and change options and packages online is also great. As is getting emailed when you have a voicemail... and about a dozen other features that make landlines look like stone tablets.
posted by Cosine at 2:57 PM on May 19, 2005

One thing to consider when making your decision is that Rogers and the rest of the cable ogliarchy will be launching their VoIP packages in July. Since you're already a customer, it might be worth waiting.

(I figure at this point with my various subscriptions they should give me the phone for free just so I'm not sending money Bell's way)
posted by cCranium at 3:22 PM on May 19, 2005

I use it in Toronto and I am Rogers Ultra High-Speed customer. Other than the 60gb cap by Roger's, and the initial setup headache (which was more of my own doing) I highly recommend the service.

It's very affordable in comparison to Sprint and Bell (especially where long distance is concerned) and as Cosine mentioned, the extra services are where Vonage really shines. For instance, extras like call waiting, call display, answering machine etc. are all included with every package. The online tools are great and having only called customer support once I cannot guarantee great service but they were quite helpful in that one instance.

As for the initial setup headache I mentioned earlier, well.. I wanted better Quality of Service (QoS) than what was available through the Vonage router so I sprung for one of these and instead of using the stock firmware (software on the router) I use one of the alternate versions of firmware to greatly enhance the services provided by my front-end router (security, wireless, dhcp etc.). However, this is probably a lot more work than what most people need to do in order to get fairly decent quality out of the Vonage service.
posted by purephase at 3:30 PM on May 19, 2005

I've used Vonage from Nassau, Bahamas to place numerous calls back to the Toronto area. The reception and quality sounded better than any normal telephone connection I got there.
posted by helvetica at 3:48 PM on May 19, 2005

When I was investigating VoIP, I phoned vonage a few times.

Everyone there seriously sounded drunk/high, and were about as professional and educated as a high school dropout after a six pack.

It sorta turned me off. Oh well. I see not all Vonage's customer service is this terrible.
posted by shepd at 9:06 PM on May 19, 2005