Vonage

When I moved out of the US several years ago one of the most useful things I brought with me was my Vonage box. It allows me to keep a local phone number back in the US and my friends, family, and business contacts can call me like they’re calling me back in the states. No long distance charges when they call me and all my calls back to the US are included in my monthly fee.

Yes, you read that correctly. People calling me dial a phone number that is no different than your typical US phone number (e.g. 310 555-1212, 212 555-1212) and neither of us pays any long distance fees. Better yet, I can be in a hotel room in China and call someone back in the US and it costs me nothing more than my standard monthly fee.

This is all possible due to a technology called Voice Over IP or VoIP. What this means is that instead of using standard phone lines to get your phone call from Point A to Point B they use the internet.

Let’s say you want to call me while I’m sunning myself in a villa on the southern coast of Spain. You pick up your phone and you dial the number I’ve had for over a decade now and your phone company directs the phone call to a local Vonage call exchange. Vonage then sends your call over the internet to me and I hear my phone ring. Reluctantly, I set down my cocktail and walk inside the house and answer the phone.

When I pick up my phone, you say “hello” and we chat. Whenever you say something it goes through the phone lines until it gets to Vonage’s call exchange and then they push it out over the internet to me. When I speak my voice gets digitized and sent to Vonage who passes it back to the phone company who sends it through the phone lines to you. Unless I have a poor internet connection or I happen to downloading several huge files on my computer there is nothing that might indicate that I am not sitting in my home in the US.

One huge benefit of this is that I have several credit card accounts back in the US. I have a drop mail address that my bills and replacements for expired credit cards are sent to. At the drop mail they collect up everything and ship it to me overseas. The only hassle with that is that when you get the replacement credit cards you have to activate them. Pretty tricky to do from overseas. But with Vonage it all goes smoothly and I have yet to have a problem activating my credit cards.

Even if you don’t live overseas Vonage can be very useful. When I moved from the 310 area code to the 714 area code back in California I simply kept my 310 phone number. For things like pizza deliveries and such where they might get suspicious of an out of area number I gave my mobile number.

For someone living the Emergency Lifestyle the benefits of a service like this should be rather obvious. Unlike Skype or other services Vonage doesn’t rely on someone having a specific piece of software installed on their system or paying usage fees. In fact, nobody even needs to know where you are. They dial a US phone number and you answer the phone. It’s that simple. And the Emergency Lifestyler likes simple.

This Vonage box I’ve mentioned is about the size of four CD cases stacked on top of each other so it’s convenient to travel with. You plug your internet connection into one slot and any regular phone line into the other and you’re ready to go.

In fact, that does bring up the biggest downside to a Vonage solution; it relies on a regular physical phone. If you’re off to Costa Rica for a week you can pack the compact Vonage box in your luggage pretty easily but you also need to either bring a regular phone with you or buy one at your destination. Personally, I’ve made the decision on a trip by trip basis.

Technically, you can get by without all of the hardware because Vonage offers a USB drive you can slap into your computer but then it becomes roughly the same as Skype and other webcam/chat sort of chat services other than the fixed phone number.

I haven’t purchased or used the USB drive so I really can’t speak too much about that.

So far we’ve talked about how it works but what exactly does Vonage offer?

As I mentioned you can have a US phone number which certainly comes in handy for a variety of reasons.

The plan that I’m on is $24.95 a month. This is in addition to any DSL or cable modem charges your ISP might charge. For $24.95 I get unlimited local and long distance calls anywhere in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, and unlimited phone calls to land lines in Italy, France, Spain, UK and Ireland. Keep in mind though that if you have a 310 area code number and someone calls you from NYC they still pay the same long distance rate regardless of whether or not you have Vonage. Their phone company is charging them for getting the phone call to the nearest Vonage exchange center.

Because I do business in Asia I added an unlimited calling plan for Asia for $10 a month and I can call 17 different countries in Asia for no extra fee. Of course, they still pay the long distance charges to call me but I can call them for nothing more than the extra $10 a month service fee.

I should note though that for calls to mobile phones outside of the US you do end up paying regular long distance call fees. But with rates as low as .01 a minute you’re probably still better off than your local long distance service.

One of the more interesting and also confusing features that Vonage offers is the virtual phone number. If I have a 310 phone number in the US and someone from New York calls me they pay long distance fees. However, for about $10 a month I can add a 212 area code phone number as a virtual phone number to my account and then it would be a local call for people calling me.

They call it virtual because you don’t actually have two phone numbers connected to two different phones. You have your primary phone number that is usually your day-to-day phone number but then this virtual phone number will ring straight to your normal phone like they were the same line.

You can also get international numbers. You can get a virtual phone number in the UK, Mexico, Canada, France, Ireland, Italy, or Spain for a nominal monthly charge (most are less than $10 a month).

What that means is that even though I’ve kept my US number I can also get a phone number in the UK (or any of the other previously mentioned countries). If a business partner in the UK wants to call me and I’m off in Australia he dials the UK number paying no extra fees.

And as if cheap calls weren’t enough of a reason, Vonage offers an array of advanced features that come standard with the service.

For instance, voice mail comes standard. But not just regular voice mail. You can actually go on their website and download your voicemail messages. So if you decide to leave the Vonage box at home when you go on holiday you can still log in and check your voice mail messages over the internet.

Vonage also offers services like call forwarding. So, if you decide to leave the Vonage box at home but you still want to take your calls while you sit on a beach in Goa you can have all of your calls forwarded to your mobile. Obviously you’ll need to pay all of the forwarding costs your mobile operator charges or for calls not included in your plan but I think you get the idea.

But what if, like me, you get phone calls at obscene hours? You can put your Vonage service on hold during certain hours. If people try to call they won’t get through which means you can enjoy your nights and naptimes even if you are dealing with people multiple timezones ahead or behind you.

The bottom line is that this is a great service for a lot of Emergency Lifestylers. I’ve been a customer of Vonage since 2004. I used it in the US for several years before taking it with me when I went to live overseas. Sure it has its annoyances from time to time but no more than you would expect from any phone company.

And in return for my loyalty, I’ve received innumerable benefits. Be it convenience because my family can ring me whenever they feel like chatting or business deals I didn’t miss because my customer felt like he was calling someone down the street.

If you love the travel lifestyle and always want to stay in touch with what’s going on back home Vonage is a great solution.