Well, we’ve offically cut the Qwest Communications cord. What a liberating feeling!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have specific animosity towards Qwest, I just disagree with monopolies, even natural or regulated ones. Life is about choices, and being hard-wired into one provider isn’t much of a choice.

Case in point:

I wanted to try Vonage as my voice communications provider. They offered free equipment and a 15 day guarantee, plus my second month of service free. With a deal like that I thought I’d be crazy not to try it out.

The “black blox” arrived about a week later, I plugged it into my router, forwarded the ports indicated in the instructions, and plugged a cordless phone into the phone jack. After a 5 minute “negotiation phase” where the black box talks with Vonage’s servers I had a dialtone and was up and online. Full services and much less expensive than Qwest.

After trying it out of a week, and being generally impressed with the service I decided to order call forwarding from Qwest to forward my Qwest telephone number to my Vonage line… That way I could receive calls as make calls on my Vonage line (okay, I could have done this all along, but I didn’t want to tell people to call me on my Vonage line via my Vonage phone number).

Qwest wanted $10 to turn on call forwarding, and took over a week to do it. After that it was only a buck-and-a-half per month. That’s way too expensive and far to long to do something simple like call forwarding! I mean, after all, what would something “complex” like voicemail cost to setup/per month, and how much time just to turn it on?

Vonage comes with all these things out of the box, as it were.

Well, after having Vonage for a month, I put in the request under the Local Number Portability (LNP) Act to have my Qwest number transferred over to Vonage. A month later it was done. Two days later I pulled the Qwest plug.

I’ve never felt happier about a “phone company” before. I save money, have less governmental regulation, more services (I even get emailed a copy of the voice messages as they come in!). It’s a win-win-win-win-win situation!

You owe it to yourself to give Vonage a look. I’ll even hook you up with your second month free.