Skype or Vonage, which is better

I actually have both of these products and have a use for each. When we were in the military calling home to keep in touch with the family was expensive. It cost $0.25 a minute to make a long distance call. Then the telephone systems had to lower their rates and it got as low as $0.05 a minute which was nice. Then came a favorite, pay a flat fee and get unlimited long distance, but, and there is always a but, you had to sign up for two of their other services, i.e. caller ID, call forwarding, etc. So our phone bill was still about $100 a month.

About a year ago we signed up for Vonage, $28 a month and unlimited long distance. This worked great as my son had a girl friend out of state and some of his friends had just moved. One of the disadvantages to Vonage is that you have to have a cable modem, which for us, because I work from home isn't that big of a deal, but for some people, they just don't have a need for a cable modem. The other disadvantage is if the cable goes out, then we do not have phone service. This isn't that major of a hassle because we still have our cell phones but it still can make your life a little difficult. In my opinion the pros for Vonage far out way the cons, so we will continue to use Vonage at least until a better product comes around.

Now some people might say that product is Skype, which up until recently was free to make phone calls to anywhere in the United States. It didn't matter if the person had Skype or not. Now you have to pay a fee to make these phone calls. It costs $14.95 a year to make these phones calls and the price increases to $29.95 after January 31st. One of the disadvantages to Skype is that you can only use it on the computer, which means unless your computer is on you can not receive phone calls on it and if you are away from your computer you can not hear it ring, normally.

Like I said, I have both types because I like Vonage for my home phone and I like Skype for the computer, when I have to talk to the companies I work for. I will let you make your own decision whether either systems will work for you. Thankfully we have come to a time when making telephones calls is no longer going to break up, even if our teenage daughter is on the phone for 5 hours. Now if only we could get the same thing to work for cable....