8.25.2009

Vonage World Plan Review - How is Voice Quality to India calls?

Vonage has recently added India to the list of countries for unlimited international calls from USA. We have opted for this connection on August 20th 2009.

This is the first cut review of this plan within very short period of time (only few days) so consider this as an initial review and do not have any strong opinion about it.

This review is a comparison based on my experience with Vonage World Plan and other calling cards I tried till date.(e.g reliance india call, airtell call home, rebtel, union telecard and true roots)


Pros:





  1. Getting the Connectivity

  2. We have observed that the connectivity is really good. During last few weeks we have observed absolutely no connectivity problem. Phone quickly connects without any problem to any number in Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Cities in Madhya Pradesh (e.g. Indore,Ujjain, Bhopal, Khandwa). I have not tried calling other cities, but if you have some experience please share in comments.

    I have kept Vonage World plan connectivity in Pros as I have seen lot of connectivity problems with few other calling cards I tried till date.(e.g reliance india call, airtell call home, rebtel, union telecard and true roots)

  3. Voice Latency

  4. Voice Latency is clearly a Pro of Vonage World Plan. I have observed all calling cards have a small delay in voice, but I did not observe this with Vonage World Plan in last few days.

  5. Voice Clarity

  6. Voice clarity is good. I did not find a difference between a USA call and international call voice level.


Cons:






  1. Voice Breaking

  2. We have observed voice breaking a few times. This has been observed more by the receiving end (India).

  3. False Rings

  4. We have observed "False Rings" a couple of times.
    "False Ring" - Means when we make a call we can hear the phone ringing, but the receiving end never gets a ring on their phone. We have observed this on Cellular phone in Madhya Pradesh.

  5. Impact during heavy internet usage

  6. This clearly is a downside of any VOIP phone. If you are watching a video on Youtube then your phone call voice will start breaking, and at times you cannot hear anything.

  7. Long duration calls

  8. We have observed that most of the times phone automatically disconnects after 30-45 minutes.



Recommendation for new users
My personal recommendation is to definitely try it, as Vonage provides you free service for initial 2 months and its worth giving a try. You can follow my referral link to try it.



Recommendation for existing customers
Existing Customers who are paying $24.99/mo or more should definitely try this plan. If you previously had unlimited USA calling plan then it will be smarter to move to World Plan at the same rate.

Update 1:
I have been using Vonage world plan for over a few months now and still didn't face much issues then above mentioned. There are few times when we had connectivity problem during Diwali & some other festivals. Otherwise connection quality is pretty much the same as it was during time of subscribing.

Please share your experience and comment if this review helped you.


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8 comments:

  1. Hey, I am signed up...the voice quality seems pretty cool. The calls are connected faster then calling cards.

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  2. We have Vonage for more than 3 yeras now and with they having upgraded to free calls to India we have been automatically upgraded and we are happy with the service. No need to use Reliance and PIN numbers. very convenient. Happy customer... :)

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  3. Calling India is a nightmare now. Was pretty good for the first few days when they made it free. But now, it only works for the first 2 minutes of a call and then the voice breaks like shattered glass. I hope they fix this - I can not make any calls to India right now.

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  4. I have Vonage world plan from few months and never had any problem. Having a unlimited call time is best thing any provider could have done. I just luv this phone cause in just $24.99 I have a landline through which I can make unlimited calls inside USA and also in India.

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  5. Cam here from Blog Catalog (Hyderabadiz)

    I envy your balanced review. See my review blog, although I am not that systematic in my reviews, as you are.

    Best wishes.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Vonage World is terrible. And that's almost an understatement. I have been experiencing call drops, choppy audio, false rings and other less severe problems with it. Lately calls have started to disconnect as early as 10 minutes into a call. Seems like they provide good (kind of) service for the first month or so, and then things start to go downhill real fast.

    I got in touch with their executive management team in Holmdel, New Jersey, and they sent me a ping-plotter program, to test for lost packets and latency checks. They tried their best to blame my ISP for all of the problems I reported to them.

    Anyway, when I got back to them with the ping-plotter test results, they just stopped responding. I have been calling and leaving voice messages to no avail.

    I am seriously considering reporting them to the BBB, and doing everything in my capacity to make sure that others are not lured to their seemingly lucrative service. The hassle is just not worth it.

    This whole experience with Vonage reconfirmed the good old saying, that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

    Please stay away from Vonage. They are rip-offs.

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Soumya Sengupta - I can understand your frustration. In fact I agree with the customer service quality 100%. Not sure why you are seeing the call quality problem. We have been using this since the launch and never saw any problem (except for few glitches sometimes).

    I have seen few friends using the phone when the watch youtube videos and online movies and still didn't complain about it.

    Again I am not trying to blame your broadband provider. What is the Broadband provider you are using? We have Comcast and its pretty stable.

    Have you tried asking for new modem replacement? May be try that sometimes the VOIP modem could be a problem.

    ReplyDelete
  8. This comment has been removed by the author.

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