Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype

I could try to claim that I switched from Vonage VoIP to Skype for my home phone service based on price ($360/year for Vonage vs. about $70/year for Skype), but in reality I think I tend to switch services and technologies based on perceived value that the company is adding to the technology industry as a whole.

Take Vonage, for example. A couple of years ago when I signed up, I was one of the first of my real-life social network to go VoIP. More than any other VoIP company, Vonage did a lot to promote the idea that an Internet-based phone service was ready for home use. These days, many of the nontechnical people I know have gone VoIP for their home calling needs, either through beleaguered Vonage or through other more heavily discounted VoIP providers.

Vonage was great for about the first 18 months. At $15 or so/month less than SBC for unlimited long-distance calling, this was a great deal. The addition of a softphone I could run while traveling was an extra plus; and home telephony management through their web portal made things like the free call forwarding dead simple.

Fast forward a couple of years and the company is in dire straits. Their call quality has declined, and incoming calls often fail to ring through. Some parts of the United States seem completely uncallable, the service just dead-ends. Their outsourced customer service has got to be the cheapest in the world — the techs are damn rude, barely speak English, and it sounds like there might be a proletarian revolution going on in the background.

So, yeah. It’s probably time again for a technology switch — I had a really good time using Skype on my laptop while in Europe this summer. Call quality from a hotel room in Budapest was about as clear as a local call, only with a little bit of packet lag. For the past few months as my dismay with Vonage grew, I’ve been thinking of going Skype with my home line (which I primarily use for outbound calls and answering the door when pizza is coming). Surely $360/year is too much to pay to answer for pizza.

The prices have dropped pretty recently on the standalone Skype handsets — while answering the door on my laptop sounds OK in theory, in practice it is fairly awkward, you miss calls if your laptop speakers are silenced (as mine almost always are), and anyone who’s not delivering pizza complains that it sounds like they’re on a speakerphone.

So I picked up the Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype today — a fairly neat little device that attaches to any WiFi network, accepts a Skype username and password, makes calls. It’s really pretty dead simple, although I did initially have some trouble associating to my access point — it wanted to use my neighbor’s instead (hah). After a couple of test calls to our cell phones and such, and Annika recording a new voice greeting, I made a 20-minute call to some family members with call quality that was about as good as the VoIP line and no drops. Pretty sweet.

The device feels pretty good in the hand, kind of like a cheap Nokia mobile from a couple of years ago. A neat bonus is that since Skype Mac syncs with your Address Book.app contacts, the handset also syncs with your Skype account, and your Mac syncs with your iPhone, you have pretty much all of your contacts available on every telephony device. And while most VoIP providers charge extra for a softphone line (WTF?) and force you to use that god-awful XTen softphone client (geez, a UI that is supposed to look like a physical device… how WinAmp circa 1999), Skype Mac is naturally a free download and a really well-engineered Cocoa application to boot. I can answer calls on the home line while at work (if I needed to), or on Annika’s laptop, or on the Belkin handset, or on the G5 media center…

I guess I could take the handset to any place that has WiFi and make calls that would appear to originate from my home line — sounds good in theory, but in practice I can’t imagine some situation where I would bring this handset thing and not my laptop.

Still, at the end of the day, I’m happy to be handing over less money to a company that’s offering a better solution with more fun geek features.

Small irony: I have to call back sometime from M-F 8-5PM PST if I want to cancel my Vonage service. They have support people answering their help number, so what the hell. I can only imagine this is some bullshit to count on the fact that during the work week I don’t have time for anything and maybe get a few more bucks out of me. This stunt is so much the antithesis of what made Vonage’s service originally innovative — using better technology to deliver a lower-cost, higher-value solution to customers.

Pretty sad, really.