Section 5.5. After You Sign Up


5.5. After You Sign Up

The first thing you'll probably do after you sign up is make a few phone calls. Once you have that out of the way, there are some things you need to know how to do.

5.5.1. Monitoring Your Account

Every broadband phone company uses a web configuration and administration utility so customers can monitor and update their service at anytime from anywhere. If you remember waiting for your traditional telephone company to respond when you wanted to make account changes, you'll be thrilled with how easy and quick such changes happen with broadband phone service providers.

Using a web administration interface means that yes, you can control the account details for a family member if they give you their username and password. You can change your account settings or check on your account from anywhere you have access to a web browser, such as a coffee shop around town or an airport halfway around the world.

The Vonage folks do an excellent job with their Dashboard view of all critical account settings and call details on one screen. Other companies have similar offerings, but I will use Vonage to illustrate the types of administration screens you will see on all the services.

5.5.1.1 Vonage's Dashboard

The Dashboard appears first when you log into your Vonage account. As you can see from Figure 5-6, just about everything you want to do with your account can be launched from this screen.

Figure 5-6. The Vonage dashboard


You can configure your startup screen to go to a different view from the login screen. For example, if you retrieve your voicemail over the Web often, going straight to the voicemail screen would save you one click. Notice the Voicemail section in the middle right of the screen, where you can press the Go button and check voicemail for the number listed. If you have more than one Vonage phone number, use the pull-down menu to define which voicemail box to check.

Also notice that the shortest call duration is "1 min" for one minute. Since you aren't charged for incoming calls with Vonage, there's no reason for them to slice a minute into smaller pieces for accurate billing like a traditional long distance company does to more accurately charge you for the exact time used. The top call listed actually left a 13-second voicemail message (you'll see that in the next section), but appears to be a 1-minute call.

When you put your cursor over the Received Calls From listings, Caller ID information appears. Not much information, but enough to remind you who called if you don't recognize the number.

The second option listed in the horizontal menu under the Vonage name is Activity. This screen just duplicates the call information with little added functionality, so I won't waste your time showing it to you.

Catch the Sales Pitch

Vonage never misses a marketing opportunity, and you can see four sales pitches on the screen in Figure 5-6. First, the "Limited Time Offer" to get two months of free service when you refer a friend. A second Refer-A-Friend plug is lower on the right side of the screen.

The third sales pitch is to add a fax line for only $9.99 per month. That's a discount from the basic $14.99 or premium $24.99 monthly fee, so heavy fax users could save some money with this option by avoiding the long distance charges that they would incur with a traditional phone line. Finally, the Affiliate Program is another type of customer referral award program.

But this is okay with me, because I believe only a few of the hundreds of broadband phone providers will maintain a national presence. Vonage will be one of them because of their marketing savvy, although some may call it marketing saturation. Besides, a personal referral from someone you trust is about the strongest sales pitch you can get, and Vonage encourages you to share your broadband phone happiness. Constantly.


5.5.1.2 Voicemail management

The second most visited web administration page, at least for me, is the voicemail page. Figure 5-7 shows my page with one short message.

Notice you have a pull-down menu to set the current phone number for the voicemail check. If you have multiple numbers, you have to remember to check them all, unless you received an email already about the message in question.

Figure 5-7. Check your voicemail from any web browser


Details on your voicemail message include the calling number, the time and date, the actual length, and a chance to listen to the message through your computer. I like this option. Anyone who has a typical answering machine with remote call pick-up probably shares my frustration at getting messages from remote locations. Here, one click and you hear your message.

In addition, I configured Vonage to also send me an email that includes the voicemail message. Less than two minutes after the voicemail message has been left, an email appears with the time, date, calling number, and a sound file containing the voicemail message.

Figure 5-8 shows the Vonage email notification page. You reach this by clicking the "Voicemail Settings" hyperlink in the main voicemail page shown in the previous figure.

Vonage doesn't offer a choice of audio file format, and they use a WAV (Windows Audio Visual) file. This file type means larger file sizes, because the file hasn't been compressed in any way, such as like an MP3 music file. However, this format has the most player options on a Windows computer, so anyone using a Windows operating system will be

Figure 5-8. Configuring voicemail delivery through email


able to play the file when it arrives. Other operating systems also support WAV files without any extra players required, so this is a logical choice.

You can choose to be just notified when you have a voicemail message, rather than have the actual message delivered via email. And, of course, you can decide not to have any type of notification this way, and just find out you have a message when you hear the stuttering dial tone on your Vonage phone the next time you pick it up to make a call.

5.5.1.3 Managing other features

Figure 5-9 shows the Features page, where you can add or configure the features for your Vonage phone numbers. The first feature to configure, with a red box for attention, is the 911 configuration screen.

When you configure Dialing 911, you see a screen's worth of explanation with two buttons at the bottom: Activate 911 Dialing and Decline 911 Dialing. Vonage strongly encourages you to accept 911 dialing and send your physical location details. So do I.

Figure 5-9. All your Vonage features gathered in one screen


Let's go through this screen:


Dialing 911

Do this, please. Click Configure and provide your physical address. 911 technical details are in Chapter 7.


Call Forwarding

You can forward calls made to your Vonage line to any other phone line that you wish. Unanswered calls roll to voicemail if they aren't forwarded. You can set the number of seconds an unanswered call will delay before being forwarded (the default is 30 seconds). You can also tell Vonage to ring both phones at oncethe one attached to this number, and the one you've listed as the forwarding number.


Network Availability Number

If the Vonage switch can't reach your router because of network or ISP problems on your end, they will forward the call to a non-Vonage number you select. This could be your traditional telephone line if you keep one, your cell phone, or even a neighbor or family member.


Voicemail Settings

Enable or disable voicemail. To reach the screen shown in Figure 5-8, you must go into voicemail and then choose Voicemail Settings.


Call Waiting

Turn call waiting on or off. You must reboot your phone adapter if you make this change. Vonage includes pretty conservative instructions for rebooting. Unplug everything, wait for three minutes, plug in your cable/DSL modem, wait until it completely restarts, plug in your router, wait for it to restart, plug in your telephone adapter (if you have one), wait for it to restart, and reboot your computer. Then check for a dial tone.


Bandwidth Saver

It requires 90 kbps bandwidth upstream to provide full voice quality on a Vonage broadband phone connection (and all other vendor's connections, as well). If you are limited in upstream bandwidth (128 kbps is not an unheard-of limit) and have two phone conversations going at once, the voice quality will degrade in unpleasant ways. By dialing back the amount of bandwidth required for each line, you can lower the voice quality slightly and guarantee your calls won't stutter, flutter, or flake out completely. There is a sliding range setting to use for this configuration. If you have only one Vonage line, you don't have to worry about this at all.


International Calling

If you don't make international calls and don't want anyone else with access to this phone to do so either, use this link to disable international calling and stop worrying.


Refer-A-Friend

This is another example of Vonage's never-stop marketing. I guess since you get service credits for signing up others, you could, maybe, call this a feature.


Virtual Phone Numbers

Want a number in another area code so people there can make a local call and have it ring on your Vonage phone? Here's where you can add a virtual number. The process is very similar to signing up for Vonage initially, except they already have all your financial details and there's nothing to ship to you.


Vonage Softphone

Regular travelers can add a software phone to their laptop for $9.99 per month per line. This softphone is a computer-centric phone and will be explored in detail in the next chapter. But adding another Vonage number for only $9.99 per month is far cheaper than paying phone charges from a hotel or paying roaming charges on your cell phone. Travelers with laptops can save quite a bit of money with this feature. (Of course, they can only call when connected, wirelessly or directly, to broadband.)


Toll Free Numbers

Want to add a toll-free number so anyone in the U.S. and Canada can call you for free? Click the link here and set up that number. You'll pay $4.99 per month and get 100 minutes of inbound calls as part of the package.

A handy page, laid out well, with a link to Help files and more information inside every feature box. Kudos to Vonage for making feature management fairly simple.

5.5.2. Monitoring Costs

Yes, all broadband phone services cost less than traditional telephone lines with comparable services. This doesn't mean you don't want to monitor how much you're paying for the services on your broadband phone service.

The extra-cost features are covered in the Features screens just discussed, so let me focus on the billing and account information pages now. You can get more financial information from Vonage, and make changes as necessary, easier and quicker than any traditional telephone company, including your cell phone provider.

5.5.2.1 Billing information online

Want to know how much you owe Vonage at any moment? Figure 5-10 shows an account billing page.

My account details will look different than yours because Vonage granted me an account for this book. The 72 cents of charged calls come from one call to London for 24 minutes. Twenty-four minutes to London for less than a dollar? Try that with your traditional telephone line.

Figure 5-10. How much, to the penny, to the day


Want a printout? Click the Printable Version hyperlink in the upper-right box and you'll see a bill formatted for paper. The numbers don't change, but the page arrangement does.

You can drill down on any hyperlinked item, such as View Billing History, and get all your past detail with one click. If you want complete call details, click on the View Call Details hyperlink in the bottom-left corner. You couldn't ever get that information from your traditional telephone company, and many cell phone providers no longer provide this level of detail. Just another advantage of a completely computerized telephone switching network as deployed by Vonage and other broadband phone companies.

5.5.2.2 Account information

The Account Information page shows all the typical housekeeping details used by any service. This is where you change your address, keep your credit card information current, and change your account password if necessary.

Vonage will gently remind you if your credit card information needs updating for your monthly billing. Your shipping address doesn't matter if you aren't expecting a shipment, but it's nice if the physical address in your account information matches what the 911 service shows for your address. You did fill out the 911 information, right?

5.5.3. What Vonage Forgets to Tell You

Vonage puts a fair amount of information on their web site. In fact, they may put more information out there about broadband phones than most, if not all, of their competitors.

However, no web site answers every single question for every single user. There are items not covered, including Vonage's ranking in the telephone company market and their financial situation.

Being a private company, Vonage doesn't have to release financial details. However, I want to get into some of those details briefly. Not to help or hurt Vonage, but as an illustration of a new business approach (broadband phone services) in the old market of telephone companies that were a monopoly for the first 100 years.

Some of these details Vonage does disclose, but they are less obvious than I would like. Don't take this as an attack on Vonage, because it's not. But there are always overlooked details and information. Here's the place for some of that overlooked (or well-hidden) information.

5.5.3.1 Technical details they don't mention

First, however, let me get into a few details about the technical side:

  1. When Vonage (and their competitors) send you a router that's preconfigured with your phone number, it's also preconfigured to work only with that service. That's the downside of the router being "free"it's free when connected to Vonage. If you change to another broadband phone service, even one that uses the same types of routers used by Vonage, your free router will become a free paperweight.

  2. Interestingly, Vonage Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Louie Mamakos says audiences don't really ask about the technical underpinnings of broadband telephony. He explains it as making telephone calls over broadband rather than over the telephone company and people accept thatexcept for a few technically minded curious people (like me), who keep asking about little details like jitter and latency and packet loss (described here):


    Jitter

    A fluctuation or flicker in a transmission, usually caused by mis-timed packets arriving early or late.


    Latency

    The time between when you ask for data and when the data arrives. It often occurs when packets are held up somewhere along their travels, such as the interface between the broadband network and the traditional telephone network.


    Packet loss

    Broadband phone services work on a "best effort" packet delivery model, so packets that get lost are not resent. The delays introduced by a guaranteed packet delivery protocol would be more noticeable than missing 1/30th of a second of conversation (which is generally the most you need to worry about with the best effort model).

    Realistically, the Internet today has so much capacity and has been so well engineered that broadband phone companies start out with an excellent foundation. In fact, Vonage claims that the reason voice quality on their circuits is usually rated 4 out of 5 is because the traditional telephone lines they rely on for connection to non-Vonage clients are rated only 4 out of 5, thus dragging down Vonage.

    When you get your broadband phone, regardless of the service provider, I bet you will agree with Vonage. When you call a user on the same broadband system, the voice quality is noticeably better than when you call someone still using a traditional telephone line.

  3. Firewalls, especially for homes and small businesses that have been incorrectly installed, can still cause problems. You'll need Vonage technical support to get everything configured properly if you keep an existing router with firewall security that hasn't been adjusted to allow broadband phone software to get through.

  4. Standards in the broadband phone world are still developing, and Vonage engineers have written around and extended some of those standards to make their system more scalable. They promise they correctly connect to all other companies using the same standards, but honestly, that sometimes takes a bit of tweaking here and there. Luckily, those issues will cause small problems between Vonage and smaller Internet Telephony installations and will be solved before too many people notice.

  5. Caller ID information on calls from other countries is pretty hit and miss. This isn't the fault of Vonage and can't be fixed with another software tweak; it's a problem caused by governments and national phone companies arguing about standards and slowly updating their systems. Caller ID from Canada works pretty well, but don't yell at Vonage if Caller ID from other foreign countries doesn't work.

  6. Of the 650 or so employees at Vonage in early 2005, about 150 are technical employees. More than 50 of those are software developers. While this ratio won't impress companies in Silicon Valley, it's a darn good ratio of technical to nontechnical workers for large companies in almost any other location and business.

5.5.3.2 Business details they don't mention

Here are some of the business details of which you should be aware:

  1. There are fees associated with broadband phones, even though they soft-pedal this fact. There are far fewer fees on broadband phone service providers than on traditional and cell phone providers. Vonage mentions this, but the information is easy to overlook.

    Here are the added costs on Vonage's premium $24.99 service:

    • Sales Tax: $1.50

    • Federal Excise Tax: $0.75

    • Regulatory Recovery Fee: $1.50

    Total for the month: $28.74. Compare that to your traditional telephone line's added fees and you're still way ahead with a broadband phone provider.

  2. Vonage follows the high risk and high reward path of Internet start-ups like Amazon.com-lots of venture capital money (about $400 million so far) and lots of marketing dollars spent. Their cost per new customer ranks higher than just about any other broadband phone company.

    While dangerousand likely to keep Vonage in the red at least through the end of 2006this is a proven market strategy that has worked in the past. The critical mass of brand name awareness among consumers has been reached: most people believe Vonage is another funny word for broadband phone. Okay, maybe not quite that strong, but the Vonage brand name has become embedded in many consumer's consciousness to such a degree that I believe they have bought themselves a place in the sun as many of their competitors go dark.

    I say "bought" on purpose, because they are $400 million deep into pockets of the venture capitalists, and will probably be $500 million before all is said and done. But it's worth it because they will almost assuredly succeed and remain the market leader in phone-centric broadband phone companies for the foreseeable future.

    Don't worry if someone, such as a traditional telephone company with deep pockets, runs in and buys them. If that happens, you'll never see a bit of difference in your service. For that matter, customers of any merged or taken-over broadband phone company will continue on, likely never knowing the computers running the broadband phone company switching and routing now sit in a different data center.

  3. As we say in Texas, "the big'uns eat the little'uns." That's true in business as well. This could play out two ways: Vonage can absorb some of their competitors and gain their subscribers for less cost than they are acquiring their new customers now because of their high marketing costs; or, Vonage can be the "little'un" and get snapped up by another company that may or may not even be in the telephone business.



Talk is Cheap
Talk is Not Cheap!: Saving the High Costs of Misunderstandings at Work and Home
ISBN: 1885167334
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 102

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