I’ve been using Vonage as my home phone the past year and generally found the quality of connections to be acceptable. There are times when I can’t use it very effectively while downloading and it seems to have hard time making reliable connections to northern ontario.

What has really surprised me recently is the number of numbers that don’t see to work. For awhile now I’ve been unable to dial 310 vanity numbers, for example Pizza Hut uses 310-1010 in Canada for all its Ontario stores. These 310 numbers break and the Vonage system tries to call numbers in the 310 area code ( someone in LA must hate Pizza Hut ). I’ve also had problems with some 1-800, 1-866, 1-888 numbers, specifically some government ones like the Revenue Canada and the Census Board. It would seem that my VoIP phone registers theses as unable, as if I was in the US. I had thought that this was a Vonage specific problem, being an American company but Vbuzzer and Skype have the same problem with issue. I can kinda accept that the service quality might suffer when there is no bandwidth but its pretty disappoint when you can’t get a hot steaming pizza delivered…

Is this a local problem to Canada or to other VoIP services in America experience the same? I did some Googling and it would appear that Vonage at least has had a history of problems with newer area codes. There’s even some posts in their forums about problems with the new 647 area code in Toronto.

I can kinda accept that the service quality might suffer when there is no bandwidth but its pretty disappoint when you can’t get a hot steaming pizza delivered..