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My chat, a few minutes ago with a live chat sales person at Vonage.com: Connected to vonage-ap1.cnxchat.com Session ID: 367003 In order to protect your privacy please do not give out your password or credit card number in a chat conversation. Ana has joined this session! Connected with Ana. Your reference number for this chat session is 367003. Ana: Thank you for choosing Vonage. I'm Ana, your chat sales agent. Before you start the signup process, what questions do you have? You: Hello Ana. You: I have to confess at the beginning here... Ana: hi You: I'm not interested in...

I'm looking to save some bucks on the telephone. I've checked into VOIP, Voice Over Internet Phone, but I haven't taken the plunge. I live in a rural area and get DSL through my local, tiny, rural phone company. The cost for simply having a phone line has gone up from $14 a month to over $40. We don't make many local calls. The biggest chunk of calls is by my wife to her relatives in Germany. So, we have telephone line costs and long distance costs.

Anyone else using Vonage? I hooked mine up yesterday in 5 minutes. The quality is outstanding. So far so good. A good month and Bellsouth and MCI can kiss my arse..

WASHINGTON--Vonage may continue to sign up new customers while appealing a patent infringement loss to Verizon, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. In another reprieve for the struggling Internet phone company, the decision arrived just hours after a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit here spent nearly two hours listening to arguments from both parties. The stay, which arrived without comment from the judges, was part of a brief order that also dictated the schedule for the appeals process. Vonage chairman and interim CEO Jeffrey Citron applauded the decision and said the company would...

Judge bars Vonage from signing up new customers A U.S. district court ruling prohibits Vonage from adding new customers due to a jury's finding that the VoIP provider infringed on Verizon's patents By Grant Gross, IDG News Service April 06, 2007 A U.S. district court judge on Friday barred VoIP provider Vonage from signing up new customers after the company lost a patent infringement lawsuit to Verizon. Judge Claude Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia denied Vonage's request to stay an injunction pending its appeal of a patent infringement ruling. On March 8, a...

MOSCOW - Russian divers have spotted the wreckage of a legendary U.S. submarine that was lost in the Pacific in 1943, a Russian news agency reported Thursday. The ITAR-Tass news agency said that a diving team from the Far Eastern State Technological University in Vladivostok found the USS Wahoo in the La Perouse Strait and took pictures of it during a recent expedition. It didn't give further details. Under the command of Dudley "Mush" Morton, the Wahoo became one of the most famous U.S. submarines of World War II. With 19 Japanese ships sunk, Morton was ranked as one of...

SEOUL — The decision to block South Korea-based U.S. military community members from making phone calls via the Internet has been put on hold. The South Korean Ministry of Information and Communications and Dacom, the Internet service provider that serves about 12,000 base customers, agreed late Thursday to a U.S. Forces Korea request to suspend Saturday’s deadline to begin blocking the service. Dacom and the two other major ISPs, Korea Telecom and Hanaro, want to ban U.S.-based voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, companies that are not in compliance with the country’s Telecommunications Business Act. South Korea agreed to “suspend...

Despite Vonage's ignominious IPO and fresh questions about its viability as a stand-alone provider of basic phone services, some smart executives are betting the market – and possibly Wall Street – will embrace another independent provider of phone calls via the Internet. Privately held SunRocket, a two-year-old provider of Voice-over-Internet Protocol (or VOIP) calls, has raised more than $46 million from blue-chip venture investors such as Mayfield Fund and Doll Capital Management, and the company is planning to raise another round of money later this year. What was Vonage founder Jeffrey A. Citron thinking? It would have been an ideal...

OYCE DORRIS knows the big-time, high-stakes telecommunications industry. She helped brainstorm the 800/COLLECT, "The Neighborhood" and 10-10-220 marketing concepts at MCI. But she's no out-of-touch, limo-riding, latte-sipping, Madison Avenue executive. She knows small-town life, too. The Vienna resident has family in Fredericksburg, visits the area, and understands the mix of commuters and country people here. And she's convinced SunRocket, the fledgling broadband telephone company she co-founded with Paul Erickson that recently launched in the Fredericksburg-area market, will fly high, even with suburban moms and rural grandmas who may be distrustful of new technology. The service, Voice over Internet Protocol, uses...

Thanks to its relentless marketing and low prices, Vonage has quickly become synonymous with phone service over the Internet. But when Brandon Sehlke and his wife, Jennifer, moved into a new home in San Antonio two weeks ago, they chose a new Internet phone service from Time Warner Cable, not Vonage or AT&T, his old provider. Skip to next paragraph The deal Time Warner offered was just too good: phone service with a television package and a broadband connection for a promotional price of $89.95 a month. "Getting all three services was better than anything else we could find," said...

What sort of luck are Freepers having with home VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service. Considering that all Freepers are tech savy along with good looking and smelling nice, I'd like to canvus those of you using VOIP (Vonage, Skype, ???) to see if it is worth investigating.

I am thinking of getting Vonage. How is it, quality wise? Is it really significantly less expensive than standard phone service, or do they hit you with hidden charges? Most importantly, I would like to know where exactly the phone adapter goes. Will I need to relocate my router and cable modem? Right now both of them are far away (upstairs on ground floor) from my telephone interface block (downstairs outside basement wall), if that matters. What are the interfaces on the Vonage adapter? Thanks.

The FCC is requiring VoIP service providers to obtain acknowledgement from customers that they understand the current limitations of their provider's E911 service. The requirement is to be fulfilled by July 29. That's a week from tomorrow, you know? According to an article in telephony news site Voxilla, some service providers are undecided whether or not any subscribers who do not comply should have their accounts temporarily interrupted until they do. Packet8 spokesperson Joan Citelli says the company will cut off subscribers who don't comply with an acknowledgement by then. The article notes that Vonage and VoicePulse reps haven't decided,...

While the company may not be exhibiting at E3 2005, Vonage met with us to give a short hands-on demonstration of its upcoming Wi-Fi phone. The phone uses a form factor similar to a standard cell phone, but connects to 802.11b Wi-Fi networks. Once connected to the Internet, the phone utilizes Vonage's voice over IP infrastructure to make calls. In tests by BetaNews, the phone performed admirably and automatically acquired network access without a hitch. Vonage's Wi-Fi phone is currently in beta testing and is slated to launch by the end of the year. Pricing will be around $100 USD,...

Internet phone provider Vonage said it's asked U.S. utility regulators to investigate allegations that a "major" broadband operator is deliberately blocking Internet phone calls. Any investigation and its findings will add more tension to the relationships between providers of high-speed Internet and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), software that lets Internet connections double as inexpensive phone lines. Vonage recently met with Federal Communications Commission representatives, said Vonage spokeswoman Brooke Schulz, to discuss an instance of "egregious, alarming and harmful port blocking." Port blocking is when Internet providers prevent traffic of certain kinds from traveling through their Internet Protocol (IP) networks....

Vonage said Thursday it intends to fight the first-ever decision by a U.S. state to regulate companies that provide Internet-based phone services. Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission unanimously decided two weeks ago that the New Jersey-based voice over IP (VoIP) provider is subject to the rules and regulations that cover traditional phone companies. The state has ordered Vonage to get the proper telephone company business licenses and to immediately pay fees to the state's Department of Administration to support 911 services, according to a representative for the Minnesota PUC. Bill Wilhelm, an attorney for Vonage, called the decision into question Thursday,...