Tom Keating offers advice on selecting VoIP services
Tom Keating has a nice post providing some practical advice for making informed choices in selecting telephone services. He says:
Pure play VoIP providers do have some advantages. First, they are less expensive, but you have to be willing to sacrifice some quality for value. I have been a pure play Vonage user (over cable data) for many years, and plan on switching in the next month (to Charter Voice) due to QoS issues.
We hear these kinds of stories all the time. We’re not surprised Tom is dumping his Vonage service. In fact, we don’t accept the premise that pure play VoIP services really are cheaper. They may be cheaper than unlimited plans from Cablecos and Telcos, but it’s not necessarily the least expensive option, when you step back and really look at it.
Based on actual usage and available phone plans from the local telephone companies in the customer’s region (plain landline carriers), only 0.1% of PhoneGnome customers would actually save money with a typcial pure play VoIP service – that’s only one in 1000 customers! For the rest of us, we are better off getting the cheapest plan for local service from our telephone company and then use either a Pay-As-You-Go or Unlimited plan on our PhoneGnome for long-distance and international calls. The average savings for a PhoneGnome customer doing so is $15.80 per month ($45.19 per month for those making international calls). Assuming a customer demands web-based voicemail and Caller-ID, only 8.7% of customers would save money with a pure-play VoIP service bundle – the other 91.7% save an average of $9.37 per month over a Vonage-like service (a whopping $ 102.38 for those making international calls). One PhoneGnome owner reports how he reduced his local service costs by $7 per month, before any savings for long distance or international calls.
So not only are PhoneGnome users able to retain the reliability, security, and quality of a traditional line, but they save money too!
Tom’s post continues:
Tech-savvy users who are willing to take the gamble on voice quality for value will find pure VoIP players attractive.
Again, based on our real-world data, we’re not so sure the value is actually there, again, if you carefully look at the real numbers and don’t just assume we will all be better off with an unlimited bundled plan (would we really pay for all those features?). Most of us can save money without gambling on voice quality by using PhoneGnome and choosing our local telephone plan and features wisely (PhoneGnome gives you many of the features with no monthly fees).
Andy at VoIPWatch sums up Tom’s post with:
The key to choosing a VoIP supplier should not be price. One has to pick the carrier who will be in business the longest. Or one has to take the approch that phone service is disposable and take the proper steps to preserve your phone numbers.
We couldn’t agree more. It’s the wild west out there. VoIP companies are going to come and go. We hope our partners are going to be around for many years, but the fact is, who knows. PhoneGnome is zero risk. If a new provider comes along with better quality/price, a few clicks at the My PhoneGnome site and, viola, I’m using a new service. No need to contact my phone company, swap out hardware, or transfer my number. No freaky dialing or training my household. They just dial as they always have. They already know how to do that.
