Ad-Vonage??

About four months ago, in response to the growing costs of maintaining a land line, my husband and I made the switch to digital phone service with Vonage. Though our cell phones bear the brunt of our telephonic communications, we still wanted to keep a separate number for our home. Just in case. My husband did a little investigation of our options and we chose Vonage for about $25 a month. The almost insurmountable upside is the super low flat rate for unlimited local and long-distance service, very tough to beat. The downsides are few yet a little strange. At times the service can be sporadic and elusive. It's a little like our phone is possessed.

Because Vonage uses our broadband connection, we occasionally experience similarly fickle service in our phone, cable TV and internet access. If it's a little stormy outside we might not get a dial tone or get online. No biggie. However, sometimes friends will call and the phone just won't ring. They'll reach us on our cell phones and tell us to check our house phone for trouble. We pick up the receiver and the hollow sound of the dial tone answers back as if there's nothing wrong at all.

Sometimes it will ring just once and then go silent. For the person calling, everything seems normal, they hear the ring and it goes to voice mail. No one would know that we were actually home.

We try to pass it off on a bad connection, trying not to let dark thoughts creep in...but? What if the phone was trying to muffle the rings, suppress the calls, cut off our link to the outside world?!

Sometimes when we answer the phone we can hear the other person, but they can't hear us no matter how loudly we shout. More troubling are the noises. Every now and then the ring tone will change completely without any outside interference. There's actually only one ring tone option on our phone, yet once in a while it will chirp strangely or ring continuously for a solid minute.

If the phone service is out completely, calls are redirected to my husband's cell phone. So, if I call our house to retrieve messages, I am instead connected to his cell phone. It's as if it doesn't want us to know who called.

Open the pod bay doors HAL.