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Originally Posted by kieranmullen
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Interesting. It does look like they might have tried imitating our PSTN numbers. I guess that's a compliment, if that's what happened.
Of course, the idea of having "local access" numbers isn't exactly new, nor did SIP Broker invent the concept. In fact, I remember calling card companies of the 1980's, and ISPs of the 1990's, both used "local access numbers" to make it easier/cheaper for callers to use their services. And SIP Broker wasn't even the first group to offer PSTN access for VoIP (for example, "Free World Dialup" had a few dial-in numbers, before SIP Broker was even founded). So if Vonage wants to provide PSTN numbers for calling Vonage customers, I don't see that we have any sort of "lock" on the idea.
Still, I find it interesting that Vonage is offering all these PSTN dial-in numbers, while still (last I heard) not allowing SIP calling to their users. So all I can conclude, is that this is a marketing ploy, to continue to try to get "customer lock in" with their service. Vonage service is clearly not "open", nor do they want it to be. Instead, they want all their customers to be locked into Vonage to handle ALL their VoIP needs (vs the "you can shop around" concepts that SIP Broker promotes).
BTW: I personally used to be a Vonage customer, a few years back (when I was first starting out with VoIP). I dropped them after they started tacking on "fees" to their bill, while "spinning it" as a rate/cost lowering (it wasn't, as the total cost to me was was going up slightly, even though the advertised "price", not counting the fees, was going down). And since that time, I haven't seen anything (including these new PSTN numbers) that would make me want to come back to them. It's not that I personally have a real bad taste about the service (I do hate their annoying TV jingle though), it's just I find them more restrictive and a little more costly than many of their competitors.
However, I suppose if I was someone with many friends/relatives in areas with Vonage dial-in numbers (not already covered by SIP Broker numbers), I might rethink that position. Because, what Vonage has essentially done, is give their customers 2-stage DIDs (i.e. like our PSTN numbers, you dial the DID, than at the voice prompt dial the party you want to reach) in a huge number of rate centers, for no extra cost (beyond the price of the Vonage service itself). So if those DIDs were of use to me, I might actually consider going back.
NOTE: Vonage is (by their design) a "locked down" VoIP service (i.e. they don't "play nice" with other VoIP services, such as SIP Broker). However, that doesn't mean you couldn't use something like a PhoneGnome or a LinkSys SPA-3102, to combine Vonage service with other VoIP. Remember, the output of the (locked down) Vonage adapter looks like a "phone line" (just as is true of many VoIP adapters out there). So VoIP hardware designed to let you hook it up to a real (telco) "phone line" as well, should work just as well to combine the Vonage adapter with other VoIP (such as SIP Broker)...