Bits Of Babbling

Vonage Powah!

I thought it about time to write in this here blog again, I'm not entirely sure why I haven't... I mean it isn't like I have had a shortage of things to say. There have been tidbits of my life very much fit for sharing, and perhaps made even more interesting since many of them you could hear from a second perspective if you knew where to look.

But fear not friends, for I have come to you with new content which is in many, many ways superior to the last bit of content! The first way is that it is actually content, that alone guarantees its superiority. I've joined the ranks of other technological pioneers who have braved the dangers and cleared the way for future consumers to have a blissful existence in a brave new world. Ok, fine, I let other people clear the path and I just sorta jumped on the bandwagon before it became a bandwagon. Whatever you call it, I've become a subscriber to Vonage*, a VOIP company, in order to significantly cut costs on my calls to Canada.

Cut.. costs.. to... Canada... what? Some people reading this may not quite understand why such words would fall in that order in a Texan's vocabulary, but I assure you that the word choice is no accident. This month alone I've spent $100+ in phone calls using a Online Calling Card which gets me 3 cents a minute to Canada. Yea, I've spent a bit of time on the phone. Wanna know more about the Canada part? Keep reading, elsewise skip a paragraph or two or ten.... Heck, I'll just put up a big red flag when you can start reading again.

So the Reader's Digest version is this: Two months, 12 days ago I began chatting to a girl (Via MSN Messenger) who started a thread asking for help on the forum I help administrate. I can't really tell you why, but we kept talking after I helped her with her web development questions, every day. Eventually what started as a friendship developed into a bit of a crush for both sides, though neither of us was quite ready to admit it. But soon enough we admitted how we felt, though we had no idea how things would work out from over 2,000 miles away or even if it would work at all.

We continued talking every day on MSN, but as you may have guessed we also started buying phone cards to unchain ourselves from the keyboard. The first round was rather unsuccessful, she bought a card which ended up being a whopping 25 cents a minute to the US, and mine was a bit better at perhaps a dime to Canada. Clearly there was a need for some cost-cutting, so I turned to my ever-faithful friend Google who referred me to Click4Prepaid.com, which helped a lot. Actually, it helped a bit too much, $70 dollars spent in May, over $100 in June, at that rate of consumption we could be pushing close to $2,000 a year! The 3 cents a minute was cheap, but it added up quickly. A better solution was called for, one involving a consistent rate which is pleasing to the pocketbook. A solution involving voip. Credit must be given where credit is due at this point, I had forgotten about voip till I was reminded by BlackKnight, another THorum goer.

Ok, you can resume reading now, I'll pick up the Canada story in another blog, it gets more interesting yet.

So today I went to Circuit City and purchased the Vonage starter kit rather than wait for them to ship me a kit on their own. The nice thing about the kit is that it costs 30 bucks after the instant rebate + mail-in rebate and there is no activation fee, saves a bit of money and more instant gratification. I'm already well on my way towards savings!

One of the nice things about voip is that not only do you typically save money on your monthly phone bill, not only do you get to call all the long distance you want across the US and Canada for a flat $30 each month, but you also get to transfer your old phone number to the service. This is a simple process involving a copy of your latest phone bill, a signing of a letter of authorization, and about 20 business days or more. Business days I have plenty of, tracking down the phone bill was a bit more difficult. More difficult still is trying to remember who is named on the account, since the billing name must be the same for both the Vonage account as well as the telephone bill. I'm still not even sure I've got that right, the bill doesn't tell you. I'll cut out the details, but suffice it say that this process was much more difficult than it should have been.

Just tonight I finally hooked it up, it was quite easy and made up for the earlier difficulties in getting all the information faxed to them to convert my phone number. I conducted an experiment to see how the voice quality was by dialing my cell phone and holding the cell to one ear with my regular phone to the mouth. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it sounded just as though I was going over a regular phone line. That’s right, I hated my voice equally as much by using this service as any other phone service! I was a bit disappointed, I thought maybe some static might improve the voice a bit... Oh well.

I can't wait to give this thing a real try, with real people, real people in Canada.

*Side note: if you are interested in subscribing, they seem to have a referral program that works out for you and me, 1 free month each if I read it right!

Posted by Michael at June 28, 2004 12:34 AM