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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.'"
Just to forestall the comments. Yes, I had a router with QOS. It didn't really work. I think that's because the amount of (especially upstream) bandwidth with your ISP isn't actually stable.
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- How is bandwidth issues Vonage's fault, or even your ISPs? There are many, many gateway devices that are specifically designed to provide QoS for VoIP calls. Dlink makes a consumer-grade, idiot proof box that works pretty good. It simply plugs in between your modem and gateway.
- Lack of e911 features also can't be pinned on Vonage. Despite FCC mandates, many LECs *still* don't allow other companies access to PSAPs. VoIP companies have been fighting an uphill battle when it comes to this. Complain to your state representatives or public utilities commission, not Vonage.
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Who cares whose fault it is?
It matters if you're assigning blame, but if the service sucks I'm not going to use it. I wouldn't go "oh, well, Vonage gets an A for effort" and use it anyway, I'd change to something that works.
Or, if you want a REALLY low-tech way to not swamp your incoming, do what I do when I need to download something from Easynews when I'm at work and don't want to swamp the whole connection - use wget with the --limit-rate option. Works amazingly well.