Last month I signed us up for Vonage VOIP telephone service. At the same time, I applied to have our telephone number changed over to Vonage. They told me it would take twenty days, but it only took fifteen. Today incoming phone calls began rining through Vonage, and not through our SBC land line.

Those of you who call us will notice some differences. We will be using Vonage’s voicemail instead of our decrepit old answering machine. This means that you’ll hear a new greeting message, in my voice. It also means that the phone will ring longer than four rings before voicemail picks up. This will give us more time to find a phone when we’re home, and none of you will ever have to listen to us answer the phone just a few seconds too late and have to fight with that awful answering machine for control of the line.

If you leave a voicemail message for us, Vonage will mail a copy of the message to my email so I can listen to it wherever I happen to be. With judicious use of procmail, I think I can also send a text message to my cell phone and to Wendy’s to let us know we have a voicemail.

I’ve learned that the 500 minute limit on the $15 Vonage plan applies to all phone calls, not just long distance. I did some quick calculations and found that tens hours is the break-even point. In other words, even paying ten cents per minute for every minute past 500, as long as we stay below 600 minutes for the month, the $15 plan is still cheaper than the $25 plan. I’ll be keeping an eye on usage to see how often we pass that point. With a teenage girl and a near-teenage girl in the house, it may not take long.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 at 8:04 pm and is filed under PGDC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.