Goodbye Vonage, Hello Gizmo Project Area 775

by Ken Yarmosh | April 17, 2006 | Posted in: Tech and Productivity

About a week ago, I cancelled Vonage. I like the features but hated the service. I constantly had calls dropped, sometimes randomly heard other conversations, and generally had at least 2-3 issues with it per week. That’s a lot considering I don’t use a landline that often.

In an ideal world, I’d like to get a cell phone that could work with two lines, one for my personal number and the other for my business. But from what I can see, the technology is just not there yet.

I’ve now signed up for Gizmo Project’s Area 775 number. I’m a Basic customer, which means I pay $ 3.95 / month to get things like dual ring (to my cell and PC), a local number (703), and call screening (can listen to callers leave messages in real time and then decide to answer). Dual ring is a great selling point for me because I often am out and about.

After some testing, there seems to be some issues that need to be sorted out but the quality of calls seem great. My main issues thus far: 1) The 775 number is showing up when I place a call to someone (instead of the 703 local number I upgraded to). If someone attempts to call me back at that number (via Caller ID), the number is not in service. 2) I submitted a request regarding this issue over a week ago yet no one has replied back to me.

One of my big qualms about Vonage (aside from quality of service) was that they never replied to any of my inquiries. CallWave (the company that powers this Gizmo service) is not off to a good start. Hope they respond soon.

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1 Trackbacks/Pings Trackback

  1. Ken Yarmosh - Goodbye Area 775, Hello Skype - TECHNOSIGHT
    June 2, 2006

    [...] If you recall, I cancelled Vonage back in April due to dissatisfaction with my service. I was ecstatic about the prospective of the features offered by Gizmo Project Area 775. [...]

3 Comments On This Post

  1. ALH says:
    April 18, 2006 at 7:54 am

    Ken

    This is a very useful post. As a vonage customer who’s enduring many of the problems you cited, I look forward to learning more about your trial run with Gizmo. And, I hope you’ll let us know if it turns out that you’ve simply jumped from the frying pan into the fire….

  2. Dennis D. McDonald says:
    April 20, 2006 at 2:17 pm

    At the Podcast Roundtable we frequently use Gizmo for our recording sessions involving five different people in 5 different cities. Takes a lot of fine tuning to cancel out the echoes sometimes but it works.

  3. guest says:
    August 30, 2006 at 10:22 pm

    The biggest mistake I have made in a long time is to sign on with Vonage. They now want $39.95 to leave them.

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