Doing voice mail math with Vonage

This is my second week using the Vonage voice over IP service. I replaced my land line and transferred over the number, so there's no going back. So far I've had no real problems. With the exception of one call that suffered from an echo, voice quality has been perfect. But I have experienced few minor hiccups along the way as I've gotten used to the way Vonage wants things set up.

This morning, for example, I was surprised to discover that my incoming calls were being routed to voice mail after just two rings. I expected it to pick up after at least three. Why was it doing that? This is a user-configurable setting, so I logged into my Vonage account online and checked the voice mail configuration to find out what was going on.

The disconnect here has to do with units. Like most humans I have been trained to configure voice mail systems to pick up after a certain number of rings. But Vonage wants to know how many seconds it should wait before sending that incoming call to voice mail.

Vonage lets you choose an answer time in five second increments ranging from 0 to 50. I had selected 10 seconds when I had first enabled the voice mail. I thought that would be plenty of time for three rings, but it's not, perhaps because the first few seconds of that time is taken up initiating the call. So I began the process of trying to figure out how many seconds are in a ring.

What was the correct answer? Vonage's voice mail FAQ on answer time doesn't suggest how many seconds would allow 2, 3 or 4 rings to elapse before voice mail took the call. So I ended up figuring it out by trial and error.

Boosting the setting to 15 seconds got me three rings but the call was gone the instant the third ring ended. I finally settled on 20 seconds, which allowed for four rings.

This trivial little time detour could have been avoided if Vonage provided some guidance on the the seconds to rings math - or if it just allowed users to set the voice mail pick up time by incrementing the number of rings. Wouldn't that be more intuitive?

Perhaps, but Vonage doesn't do that, said spokesperson on Twitter, because ring durations vary by country.