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Old 10-07-2005, 09:32 AM  
OY
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Location: USA/EU/ASIA
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I have used Vonage for almost two years and it is mostly great - except for a few inherent flaws.

1. If you go out of town and for some reason your broadband provider drops - no one can call you nor do they get a voicemail - just a stupid message saying the number is temporarily not working. And there is no way to restore it except for waiting for your ISP to come back online. Stupid in my mind - should at least have a way to divert calls to a voicemail system.

2. If YOUR power has an outage (if longer than what your UPS can handle) and you are out of town and the vonage "box" takes a dive then the same thing happens to your line as I described in #1 - problem is that now you have NO way of doing a manual reset and your telephone line will be out until you can get back home and reset everything.

3. Imagine the two things I described above and envision that ANY of your broadband connections (Cable modem, router or similar) goes down - now you are without a phone line that works when you are out of town.

Before Vonage or anyone else comes up with a solution to these issues VOIP will not be perfect. Its good, but not perfect.

Bill is nice and low though.

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