Vonage
Background
I have been using Vonage for VOIP services for 15 years. The service started at $20-$25 and met my needs at the time. It has been great and after a few years, they introduced unlimited calling (mostly land lines), to 100+ counties calling for a slightly more, or about the same price. This was great to keep in touch with contacts in foreign countries at a reasonable cost, with the convenience of not having to use a calling card (remember those?). I was able to extract every bill in a few minutes from Quicken to plot the bills over the years.
Fax
In my mind, I continued to justify the service for having the ability for sending a fax. When last did anyone need to send a fax ?Current state
After a recent review of bills, it appeared that I was now paying close to $50 a month for this service. I had not sent a fax in years and had not called a land line in a foreign country in months. Most of my contacts are now on WhatsApp. The call and video quality exceed the old VOIP services.
I did not want to loose the Vonage number, but definably could not justify the expense.
Steps
- Bought a SIM card for $1 and started the process to port the number to a local cell provide (you will need a spare cell phone) to activate the SIM. I used the H2O SIM card.
- Wait for a few days and confirm the number is operational. Had to add $10 to the provider to confirm full functionality
- The next step was to port the number over to google voice. Google charges a $20 fee for the porting.
- Confirm number is ported to Google Voice. Setup up forwarding to another number or do nothing and get email notification of a missed call or voicemail.
Cost for migration and savings
Once off costs
- $1 + tax for SIM card
- $10 added to cell account
- $20 Google voice porting fee
Savings
$45 per month or just under $550 per year
Links and references
FTC guideH20 Wireless - support website resources for port-in status. Contact customer service for PIN and approval for port out.