But not really.
First of all, I’m sure plenty of you are wondering what Vonage is. Simply put, it’s an awesome service that has allowed us to keep our last US home number through four countries now. Friends, family, and business contacts in the US can call us on our old US number, and a phone in our German (or Swiss or Italian) apartment rings. We have a box from Vonage that we hook up to our high-speed internet and a telephone, and we’re good to go. Voicemail messages get sent to us via email, so even when we don’t have the Vonage box with us, we can find out who has tried to contact us and hear the messages.
Now on to why you should cancel if you have it. I have it on good authority (ie, not only have I tried this, but one other person I know, too) that Vonage is willing to offer two free months of service to customers who want to cancel their accounts. Just call to cancel (the only way to cancel is by 1-800 number – very annoying when we wanted to cancel but didn’t have the Vonage phone to make the call from!), and hold out until they offer you two free months of service to stay. Woo hoo, free phone!
So why did we want to cancel? It’s a little pricey if you don’t make that many calls. For us, we pay around $20 per month for up to 500 minutes of outgoing calls. While we have been happy with the service so far, we realize that we probably don’t make/receive enough calls to the US per month to justify spending $20 for a US line, especially given how rarely our friends and family in the US bother to call us (want to prove me wrong? Call us! Just remember the time difference…).
There are numerous other cheap international calling schemes out there, too. Skype is probably the most famous (but didn’t work with our crappy Swiss internet, so neither of us is in the habit of using it). We’re also test-driving Rebtel right now. I’ll let you know if we like it.
What do you other expats use to make phone calls to the US?
