Last year, voice-over-IP veteran Vonage earned an Editors' Choice by offering reliable home-phone service, unmatched call quality, and competitive pricing ($24.99 monthly). The company's new Vonage Pro package maintains two out of the three, having bumped the price by $10 monthly while adding only a few noteworthy features—in particular, visual voicemail and a softphone application. This makes the new Vonage service considerably more expensive than competing services like ViaTalk and VoicePulse ($24.99 and $22.99 monthly, respectively). It's a solid service, but I suspect few users will find sufficient value in the new features to justify the higher rate. Fortunately, going Pro is optional: You can still get Vonage Classic at last year's price.

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology leverages your existing broadband Internet connection to provide cheaper-than-landline residential phone service. Plug a special adapter into your modem or router, plug your phone into the adapter, and presto: You've got a dial tone. Vonage provides the adapter--a new, company-branded model with a nifty amber-lit status LCD—free of charge when you sign up for service. You can also keep your existing number, but be prepared to wait upward of several weeks for it to transfer from your local telco. Until then, you're stuck using the number assigned by Vonage when you sign up.

As part of your flat monthly fee, you get unlimited local and long-distance calling anywhere in the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico, plus free calls to landlines in England, France, Italy, Ireland, and Spain. Other package features include call waiting, call forwarding (up to five numbers simultaneously), caller ID, three-way calling, and voicemail. You also get nifty extras like repeat dialing (Vonage rings your phone when the previously dialed number is no longer busy, then connects the call when you pick up), voice-activated speed-dialing, and network-outage forwarding. The company's free Click-2-Call software can automatically dial numbers in your Outlook contact list or on a Web page.

I particularly like the Vonage Access feature, which lets non-Vonage customers call you at local rates. For example, if Grandma lives in Miami and you live in Michigan, you can give her a Vonage Access number with a Miami area code. After she dials that number, she then dials your regular number—and pays only local rates for the call. That's a great perk, though Vonage still trails ViaTalk in the feature department: It lacks goodies like call broadcasting, call recording, and wake-up calls).

Vonage also offers a feature called Visual Voicemail, which transcribes messages into text delivered via e-mail or SMS. It's not a bad way to get voice mail on the go, but the Pro package includes only 25 transcriptions per month. After you burn through those, you pay 25 cents per message. To me this seems stingy: If you receive just one voice mail per day, you'll end up paying extra. Even worse, there's no account setting that automatically disables Visual Voicemail when you reach the cap; you have to track your message count manually and disable the service yourself to avoid overage charges.

On the plus side, Visual Voicemail works quite well, delivering transcribed messages (and, optionally, an audio-file attachment) within minutes of receipt. Accuracy was very good, probably because after computers perform the initial speech-to-text conversion, human operators double-check it. Needless to say, this raises some privacy concerns: Although Vonage reps say its operators never see the caller's name or phone number, there's certainly an expectation of privacy when someone leaves you a message—especially if it's a friend or family member. Personally, I'd worry about violating both parties' privacy by utilizing Visual Voicemail without their consent.

Your Vonage Pro account allows 25 free directory-assistance (aka 411) calls per month, with additional calls costing 25 cents apiece. This represents a fairly substantial savings, since without the Pro package, subscribers pay 99 cents for every 411 call. But if you're among those who typically look up phone numbers on the Web (and I would guess that VoIP users would tend to fall into this category), there's little value in this offering. But if you're the type who makes a lot of directory assistance calls, it's a good deal. —Next: Vonage Companion