All, I am in the market for new phone service for my home and a neighbor mentioned to me about Vonage and how he loves it. Last night we were at WalMart and I noticed that they have Vonage and Skype info.

I'd like to get inputs from those that have either service or if you had one then switched, why did you and what are the pros & cons of the services. Thanx for your inputs.

We have a Skype number at the office, but it does not have any emergency service. So for a home phone I would definitely want to know that someone could call 911 from my home phone.

We have Vonage and we LOVE it. Very rarely does the phone not work even if the internet is slow. You can't beat the price per month compared to other services. It's nice to not worry about long distance calls since we do a lot of work over the phone. And we recently moved out of our home office to a new studio and we were able to not have get a new number at our new location which made everything super easy with getting settled in our new place.

Hope this helps ...

we're fans of vonage!

Thanx for the inputs. Yeah, the reason we want to switch is because it's rather expensive to call my parents in Mexico, and we don't call them in Mexico that often because they have a TX cell phone. But for 1 time I had to call them when they were sick, I talked to them for about 35-40 minutes and the cost of that call was just shy of $100. My neighbor told me that with Vonage he can call Mexico for $.01/minute, and he travels a lot to Mexico, and all calls in the US are all free.Another thing that really bothers me is all the complicated options in the phone service. When I lived in TX I could call my parents and my wife (then girlfriend), each at over 130 miles from where I was and it was a local call. Here, we have local, local toll, local long distance, and long distance, with different charges for each based on distance. This is ridiculous.Thanx JT, that is good to know. In that sense then Skype doesn't make sense for use. Just the other night my wife had stroke symptoms (luckily it wasn't a stroke) and I had to dial 911 and I don't know if the cop was in the neighborhood, but less than 2 minutes after I hung up with the 911 operator the cop was knocking our door.Thanx for the info. What about additional charges, are there any? Or is the $24.95 I see advertised the only charge? I'd hate to plan for a $30 phone bill (including taxes) and then realize there were hidden charges and my bill is now more than I had planned.

Another happy Vonage customer here. We're on the residential 500 minute plan which comes out to $19 something after taxes but we haven't been dinged with hidden fees. That plan gives us plenty of features for about half of what the phone company charges.

I'm not sure your plan would be $30, though. I've only looked briefly at the website but you said you were interested in calling Mexico which appears to be part of the "Call Mexico and Latin American" plan and is listed as $40. You might call a customer service rep for help to make sure. I've been very happy with the customer service I've received from them so far.

(As I make this my first post, I realize that it might look a bit like I'm just a shill for Vonage but I promise I'm not...just a happy customer. )

Vonage works great...when I'm not uploading photographs. When I'm FTP'ing files, it sucks. But, hey, it's cheap!
Cory

I love skype. I've got a netgear cordless phone and skype in that i use for the office line. i've got the local police/fire numbers programmed in so i don't really worry about not being able to make emergency calls. if i really need to - i can.

skype has worked out great for me. i just started on a skype pro plan, paying about 3 bucks a month for unlimited calls... pretty nice!