Tuesday, August 09, 2011

Vonage mis-advertising

No unlimited calls on Vonage


a comic strip!

Vonage has managed to pull together another marketing gimmick with customers. It claims “unlimited” international calls for personal usage which is totally incorrect. In terms of service section, Vonage very brilliantly says that the usage should not exceed normal customer behavior. Then it says that 95% of customers use 3000 minutes or less. I doubt that the statistics is true but we cannot argue on that. So in short a customer is allowed 3000 minutes of international calls for a monthly bill of $35. This is after all the promotional offers which normally get over by first 3 months.

I mainly call India and did calculation of all international calls to India. It comes to 1.2 cents per minute for first 3000 minutes. This price is still cheaper than 1.75 cents that is charged by reliancecall and other services. But at least those services don’t claim service to be free for unlimited calls.

I am not saying service is bad or costing very high. But surely the marketing material is misleading customer i.e. us.

Cable companies have started offering international calls now. Time warner, FiOS and Optimum are few ISP providers that I know offer international calls. Time Warner I believe cancels the service when the usage exceeds certain limit. FiOS claims it is literally unlimited. If you have some experience with these cable companies, kindly comment below.