Sun 4 Nov 2007
The bad news for Vonage just keeps on rolling in. The face of VoIP providers everywhere has reportedly coughed up $80M to make Verizon leave them alone. That's almost a third of their cash on hand, not a pretty picture for a company with high churn rates due to some lacking customer service.
It's only downhill from there. According to a security firm, Vonage could be wide open to line hijacking. Among the key elements cited is a lack of encryption used between their telephone adapter hardware and their VoIP gateways. Combined with weak authentication, it could take as little as a phone number and a name to make Bob Jones of Virgina have his calls ring in Moscow with little indication that anything is wrong.
I've been using Vonage for over three years myself and I can attest to their kind of crappy service. It took me over 4 months to get a simple e-mail problem fixed and about 2 months to get them to swap my primary and secondary numbers (after which they forgot to activate my voice mail box). Despite that, I've been pleased with the service. I am, however, worried that I'll wake up one morning and find I no longer have a dial tone.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
You can always ditch vonage and use Skype instead. With Skype you can get Skype out which let’s you call any number in the US. You can get Skype In which gives you a phone number that anyone on normal phones can call for about
You can pair those with a Skype phone. There are Wi-Fi, wired or USB versions. With those you have all the advantages of skype (conference calling, free skype-to-skype, etc) as well as the advantages of Vonage.