Vonage — a phone service for the frequent traveler

I still travel quite a lot.  In a previous life, I had to do a fair amount of business travel, but nowadays I try to travel as much as I possibly can whenever I get any time off.  Calling home has always been a problem.  In the days before mobile phones became ubiquitous, we were at the mercy of the hotel companies, and I remember elaborate schemes of making collect (reverse charge) calls from hotel lobbies.  Iran, my wife, would interpret these calls as a signal to call me back in my hotel room after five minutes.  How times have changed!

When traveling overseas, though, calling can be quite expensive if you don’t plan carefully.  Part of my present system involves the use of Vonage, a provider of VOIP telephone service.  (VOIP stands for Voice over Internet Protocol).

Vonage’s VOIP service works like this.  You get a little device from Vonage that you attach to the router that comes with your broadband service using an Ethernet wire.  Then you attach a standard telephone to the Vonage device, and that is all there is to it.

The telephone now has a dial tone, and for $25.99 a month you enjoy unlimited calling to the United States and about sixty other countries, including most of Western Europe, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Argentina, Japan, Brazil, and New Zealand. But the benefits of Vonage to the traveler don’t stop there.  Here are some other things you can do if you have Vonage service.

• Voice Mail — Friends don’t send friends voice mail!  People who know me well don’t usually leave me voice mail as they know how I hate it with a passion!

How many people leave information that you can get from caller ID?  (Name, number, and time of call!)  How annoying is that?  But Vonage’s voice mail, an included service, makes it a little better.  You get an e-mail with the voice mail as an attachment and a text transcript of what the person said.  To me, this almost converts voice mail into an acceptable way of communicating with others!  And it is quite useful when you are away from home.  Apologies for the diatribe!

• Virtual Numbers — for a small monthly fee, you can get a virtual number.  For example, I pay an extra $4.99 a month to have a number in central London.  These numbers connect to your home phone.  So, when I am in London, I can call home using a local number from my UK pay-as-you-go mobile phone, completely avoiding international charges.  It is also great to give out that number to my friends in England so that they can call me cheaply.  Vonage offers vitual numbers in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.  So, if there you travel to one of these countries often, it makes sense to have a number that is a local number there.
• Portability — this is cool.  When you are traveling, you can pack your Vonage device and phone and plug it into the router at your destination.  This basically means that I can have an American number and connection when I travel. I recently did some consulting for an organization based in Egypt.  Once the Vonage device was installed for them, they were able to make calls to all the countries Very handy and cost effective to have a Maryland number when I am on the road.
• Call Forwarding – when you are traveling you can forward your calls to one or more phones that will ring simultaneously if called.  (This includes the ability to forward calls to numbers at your destination.
• Do Not Disturb – you can make sure that your phone doesn’t ring when you don’t want to be disturbed.  This is easy to switch on and off either through the phone or by accessing Vonage’s website.

This might sound rather like an advertisement for Vonage, but it isn’t.  I really find it to be very, very useful.  And there are a few negatives.  For one thing, I sometimes worry about the financial stability of Vonage.  I would truly hate it if it went away.  My only other reservation is that I once had an overpayment of my account.  Getting that money back was like extracting blood from the proverbial stone, and it involved repeated calls and hours of wasted time.