Digital Trends

Vonage Broadband Telephone Service January 19th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

All Of The Features You Could Want

Vonage has three residential calling plans. Like a regular POTS carrier, you are not charged for toll-free, 911 or incoming calls. They offer a “Premium Unlimited Plan” for $34.99 a month. This plan offers unlimited long distance minutes and unlimited local minutes. For $24.99 a month, the “Unlimited Local” plan allows for unlimited local calls and 500 minutes of long distance. The “Basic Plan” offers a total of 500 minutes combined for local or long distance. There are also business plans that add a second line for a fax machine.

These prices already look pretty good compared to the plans offered by most telephone companies. But it's the added features that really set Vonage apart. Included free with every service plan is voicemail, support for caller ID, 3-way calling, call forwarding, call transfer, and many more features. Each subscriber also has access to their “Dashboard” — a secure portion of the Vonage Website used to view and control subscriber accounts and features.

Vonage also offers some useful add-on features. One such feature is the “virtual phone number”, which allows subscribers to pay $4.99 a month for a second phone line that rings on their main Vonage number. The usefulness of this is, if people often call you long distance from the same area code, you can get a number that is local to them so they don't have to pay long distance fees.

Other pay features include toll-free numbers, fax lines, and an enhanced directory assistance system.

The voicemail system alone is quite an impressive feature. Voicemails can be retrieved from your Vonage connected phone or any phone in the U.S. Vonage even offers local access numbers across the U.S. so you can check your mail without being charged a fee. You can also download your voicemail from your account Dashboard as a .wav file. This .wav file can be saved on your hard drive and even e-mailed with ease. We thought being able to check and store your voicemails over the Internet was one of the best and most useful features.

Another great feature of the Vonage voicemail system is that it sends you an email when you receive a message. This is great if you are at work and want to know when you receive a call at home. The .wav files are available on your dashboard literally within seconds. In several tests we conducted, our voicemails were ready to be downloaded in less than 30 seconds. We also received the notification email just as fast.

Your outgoing messages can be changed with ease and you can actually program messages for different times of the day.

The only down side of the voicemail system that we could find was that the .wav files it creates are a bit on the quiet side. We had to crank up the volume on our PC when we wanted to listen to the Voicemail. Hopefully Vonage will fix that soon.

How cool is this? Manage and download your voicemails from the Internet.

The rest of the “Dashboard” system is just as useful. You can view a real-time log of your calls for the month. A list shows all incoming and outgoing calls, the duration, the to and from numbers and the date and time. You can sort and search your call activity to see how many calls were made to or from a certain number, by time and date, or even by duration. All call activity information is available on the “Dashboard” almost instantly.