Vonage, Those Lying Bastards
I teach Composition for a living, which is really the nice way of saying I teach lying for a living. So, I found it rather ironic that while I was complaining about the Vonage ads Scratch reminded me that ads were supposed to lie.
I’ve never used Vonage, but I’ve used Skype, their free corollary. Vonage, in their ads, rail against Comcast and AT&T for their “bundled” services, saying they force people to get something they don’t need to get a deal. Well, let’s think about this for a minute. Without High speed internet Vonage doesn’t work, at all. So, now in order to use their service you must first purchase high speed internet, probably from a local phone or cable company. Therefore, you now have “bundled” your service with Vonage, but instead of paying one bill for two services, you get the more traditional two bills for two services. Amazing.
Maybe it’s me, but I don’t see that as a boon.
I’ve never used Vonage, but I’ve used Skype, their free corollary. Skype is okay for what I used it for (affordable overseas calling), but I don’t really like it. However, the best part about Skype is that you can talk to other Skype users tethered to their machines for free. Not “free” as in “included in the price” like those other calling plans that offer “free long-distance”, but free as in “not costing anything”.
Of course, the downside to any of these services is the crap sound quality you get. If you’re old, like me, you might remember the old Sprint commercials with the “pin drop” thing. That’s right, years ago call quality was so good you could hear a pin drop over the phone. Now we have these garbage cell phone quality calls where the catch phrase is, “can you hear me?” Note, they never say, can you understand me, but just hear me. If you ever get a chance use an old rotary phone sometime. Preferably with someone using the same on both ends. You will be astounded how different the quality is. I’d say you could give me a call, but my wife chucked my rotary during the last move, and all we have now are these damn cell phones. *sigh*
Anyway, come back next time for more advertising hatred.
