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I'm switching to Vonage

After moving down to the Dallas area, I decided to use SBC for my phone service. They seemed to offer some competitive plans for local/long distance calls and they had a really good web site. I signed up. I hate them now.

One of the first features I missed from my old Verizon plan when I lived in the Philadelphia area was answer call. Their automated voice mail system. After going through a number of answering machines it’s one feature I liked a lot. It just always worked.

Since I found out my new SBC plan didn’t include their CallNotes™ feature I had it changed around to add it. Doing this meant moving to a wider area plan which forced me to change my phone number. I don’t know why. Being a new resident, and having deliveries being made, I had to call up everyone to update them. Inconvenient, but I had my voice mail.

I had a plan I thought included free long distance calls, too. I was surprised to get a $230+ phone bill the next month which told me otherwise. It wasn’t free, the plan “included” long distance but that doesn’t specifically say it’s free.

Okay. MCI calls and asks me to switch long distance. I switch. Screw SBC.

My next bill comes and I’m getting more irritated now by my local charges totalling up to $70 a month. About 40% of these seems to be all these mysterious taxes and surcharges.

I would call SBC’s support to weed out unnecessary features, but prior experience with that was awful assuming I could even get through to anyone.

So today, I was prepared to call them and decided to check out VoIP as an alternative. I’ve read a lot of things both for and against, but I’m taking the plunge because I’m disgusted with SBC.

So that’s why I’m switching to Vonage and I’ll report my experiences here. Stay tuned if you’re interested.