I was a Vonage customer for years. First with a residential line, then another personal/business line, and then most recently my primary business phone was a Vonage line. Vonage is fine, I’m not going to complain about quality, it’s as good as our internet connection, which isn’t amazing, so there’s that. I switched my business line over to Ooma. I liked the feature set, the mailboxes and the pricing. It works/sounds great. No complaints there other than the lack of voicemail transcription. Both Google Voice and Vonage have that, it rules.

So Ooma’s cool, it’s working fine, I’m happy, but if you’re a current Vonage customer and you call our work line, you get a message saying the the line is out of service and can not be connected. This is because Vonage still has routing in place for my number that assumes it to be ‘within network’ if you will. But now that the number resides elsewhere in the ephemera, I am not at all ‘in network’. There are numerous posts about this phenomenon online, and there are some people saying that Vonage isn’t trying to be malicious, it’s just the system, blah blah. That’s bullshit. A five minute phone call to Vonage Technical Support is all it takes to ask them to fully release your number. It’s a simple task, and it should be automatic whenever anyone cancels their account. The fact that it is not automatic is what makes it malicious. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for them not to release the number completely and the only thing it causes is inconvenience.

Furthermore, most people do not realize that this is going on. We’ve gone for at least three months before it became strikingly obvious that Vonage customers were unable to contact us properly. How much business did we lose? Probably enough to negate the savings that I assumed in using a VoIP phone line.

So there’s a quick rant, hoping that someone else may stumble across this and it will help them to avoid the same negative affect. If you cancel your Vonage, make a point of telling them to release your number completely, and then go and confirm that it has been done by having a friend or foe with Vonage call your line to check it.