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Ahead of IPO, Vonage Faces User Complaints
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "Internet phone-service provider Vonage (whose planned IPO was mentioned on Slashdot last week) is confronting complaints of poor sound quality, dropped calls and other glitches, the Wall Street Journal reports. From the article: 'Customers who try to leave are complaining of bureaucratic hassles and snafus, particularly when they seek to switch services and take their numbers with them. Ironically, Vonage has long complained that local phone giants drag their feet in releasing the phone numbers of customers who want to leave.'"
I signed up for the Vonage service, tried it, didn't like it, tried to leave. I went through a bit of a nightmare trying to cancel the service and ended up needing to resort to the BBB. I wrote up the experience here: http://david.weekly.org/writings/vonage.php3 - apparently from the comments others have had similar experiences.
David E. Weekly
Code / Think / Teach / Learn
h4x0r for
..except that they can't get local numbers everywhere yet, but that's the fault of the smaller telco's who aren't under the fed's microscope.. and don't let 3rd parties in the door.
did have a call quality problem initially, but that ended up being the connection it was using; 128k upstream was too slow, even though it's only supposed to need ~90k or less. upgraded the dsl to 256k upload and everything is perfect (aside the fact from our telephone number being based in a city on the other side of the state).
Of the 3 problems, the first was by far the biggest. The quality just wasn't professional some of the time, and it repeatedly emabarrassed me with customers (I'm a software contractor). Also, when the audio was breaking up, I could never tell. The person I was talking to had to inform me. At a minimum, Vonage should make some sound happen on the your handset to let you know something's not right.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
Same deal here. The simple fact was my ISP didn't give me good enough connection for consistent phone quality - and I wasn't on a lite plan or anything. Good product, good support, but trying to leave or even downgrade my plan was an expensive hassle. There was also a massive problem with getting the unit delivered in the first place because of difficulties with DHL. Their technical people are great, but everybody else that I talked to there drove me nuts.
I have vonage, and I'm pretty happy with the service. I'd say 8 out of 10 calls are good enough. I use the service more as a 15 dollar voicemail service. As I don't like phones, this is a cheap and easy solution for me.
However I've had some odd experences. For instance a friend of mine had it, then canceled it. When he had vonage, he setup call fowarding to his parents cell phone (they all lived in the same house). Well, they canceled for a bunch of reasons (mostly quality). Now when I call their house the call gets automaticly fowarded to the cell phone, since I'm a vonage customer. They've called them about the problem several times and there's "nothing they can do".
Ask and ye shall receive.
http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic6794.html
I had vonage, tried to cancel after 11 months of mediocre service. Refused to cancel without charging a $42 cancelation fee even though they claim month-to-month with no contract. I charged it back and luckily mastercard is sticking up for me, but an incredible hassle! Avoid Vonage like the plauge
I've had Vonage for over a year and now have two lines. I used to complain about the quality as did others on the other end of the call. I recently rebuilt my network (and got rid of my PoS netgear FSV318) and now the quality is absolutely flawless. I'm on a 15mbit/2mbit cable link and I can use nearly all of my bandwidth without even a hiccup on the line. Here's the trick:
I ordered a 2nd IP from my ISP and separated my data network from the voice. In other words, I stuck a switch behind the cable modem with my router (p3 866 running pfsense Freebsd 6) in one port and the motorola vonage box in the other. The difference was absolutely amazing even though there's no prioritization of the SIP and RTP packets. Since pfsense has pretty good QoS capabilities, I might eventually stick the vonage box behind the router and get rid of the 2nd - we'll see.
For those of you who have your vonage box behind a cheap linksys router, forget it. The consumer-level devices simply can't put out the pps to support network usage and simultaneous VOIP usage.
Hope this helps.
You sure can fax over the main vonage line! I do this all the time via my winmodem, and I don't have a second vonage line, just the primary. Just set the baud rate to 9600, and fax away....never had a issue
I work for TimeWarner cable. We've got the digital phone product (not true voip, btw, but voip thru the cable system before it's handed off to Sprint).
We are happy to port numbers from other providers... the "normal" is 7 business days to get the number from Verizon.
It takes TWENTY business days to port a number from Vonage. That's a full calendar MONTH.
And they have the balls to bitch about telcos dragging their feet??
At least they don't do what Frontier (smaller local telco in upstate NY) does; Give/Sell your number to telemarketers before porting it! Nothing like a little "fuck you!" as you leave them...
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Same here. No problems with fax over Vonage.
I currently have 2 providers, Vonage and Sunrocket.
If it wasn't for Vonage giving me some credits recently, I would already have cancelled. My bill keeps going up as they raise their fees, and now they are charging me local taxes, too. If I wanted to pay unknown taxes and fees, I would have stayed with my telco.
But anyway, Sunrocket has been great. While their Customer Service is notably lame (but I expect nothing less), they have better features than Vonage, including E911. Plus, they give you some pretty cool free phones when you signup, and there is no signup fees, or wacky charges.
What does it cost? $199 for an entire year (or $24.95/mo) with no other fees/taxes. And, since I know Slashdotters are too lazy to type in a URL, here it is for you: http://www.sunrocket.com/
However, I tried out their competitor, Packet8, for a month because Vonage couldn't get me a local number and Packet8 could. Packet8's technology is much worse. Their website is not as feature rich as Vonage's. Their phone functionality isn't as slick either. Vonage is great a figuring out what your'e doing when dialing a number. Dial a 10 digit long distance number without the "1", no problem. Dial with the "1", no problem. Dial 7 digits for a long distance number in your same area code ... and no "1", no problem. Packet8 was real simple. If you wanted to dial long distance, it was "1" plus the 10 digit number, period. If you wanted to dial a local number, dial the 7 digits only, period. Anything else was borked. Oh, and by borked I mean get a busy signal, not the "we're sorry, I couldn't connect you" message. I pissed away a whole afternoon waiting for someone's phone line to free up, only to realize they weren't on the phone .... it wasn't actually busy.
Almost all of my calls on packet8 had echo's etc. on the line during the call. I'd have to wait 30 minutes on hold to speak to a customer service rep with Packet8 as well, and while they'll happily take and email from you, they don't respond.
Packet8 also holds you to the terms and conditions, no exceptions, period. You get a 30 day grace period to return the equipment with no penalties. That 30 day grace period starts when you order the service, not when you get the device and plug it in. So, not realizing the 30 days started when I ordered the service,I called 2 days too late and got nailed a $65 cancellation fee plus I have to ship them back their equipment. "Too bad, so sad" was about all the sympathy I got from them. They know when your equipment hits the door, because you have to jump through hoops to get it hooked up and get a working dial tone etc., so they use the order date just to screw you out of a week of trial period.
Oh, and of the 4 times I called them they hung up on me/connection was dropped twice (I think accidently both times). So, it took three phone calls and over an hour on hold just to find out how bad I was going to be takin' it in the rear to cancel the service.
Is Vonage perfect? No. Are they as good/better than their competition? In my experience yes.
I've had Vonage for almost a year now and am having 0 problems with them. I can't actually believe that my situation is not the norm? Their service has been excellent. I use them along with cable service and QoS actually works, and works very well. I can literally watch myself downloading a large file, pick up the phone, and see my transfer rates drop. And I rarely get dropped calls.
I have a Vonage business account and use a fax line as well, and basically turning ECM off fixed all the problems I was having with it not wanting to talk to some fax machines.
Happy customer here. And no, I'm not buying into the IPO but I'm so happy with 'em I got my parents to switch to using them as well. VOIP is cheap now, take advantage of it while you can. And all the cool call routing features and voicemails in my Inbox are clutch.