Ahead of IPO, Vonage Faces User Complaints 212
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.'"
Left Vonage after a short trial (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Left Vonage after a short trial (Score:1, Interesting)
Poor Vonage (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is Vonage is too hard for most people. All the things that can go wrong with a regular cable/DSL Internet connection now suddenly affect their phone service.
I work for a VoIP phone company. We get people calling in because after they unplug their modems to move them downstairs, they have no phone service. They're angry and mad and just don't understand how that would cause them not to have a dial tone. This is only one example, I'm sure you can think of others. Their old Bell South phone service 'just worked', and now they are having to reset routers and make sure the MTA is plugged into a phone jack/NIU. It's really complicated for the average person.
To make it worse, some Cable/DSL ISPs throttle their own VoIP traffic above all other traffic, and it's my beleif they have a way of changing the priority of other carrier's VoIP traffic to boost the quality of their own service (in comparison). Even if they don't admit to it or not, I wouldn't put it past them.
Add all this to Vonage's off-shore support who are at times hard to understand for the average 60 year old customer and you have some very miffed people. They feel the phone service is at fault, when they actually need to reboot their modem.
I'm sure Vonage has even more problems than I do, because we happen to be both the ISP and VoIP provider. I can only imagine what unknown variables they have to deal with, which are 100% required to deliver a quality, stable service.
Happy Vonage Customer so Far (Score:3, Interesting)
I haven't noticed any quality issues, however this may just be because my ISP isn't a telco. I wouldn't have bothered posting to the forum except that I am interested to know how many people are unhappy with Vonage and if those people's ISP's are all telcos.
This is probably the biggest network neutrality battle that there is today and I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the majority of people with complaints have all had their service screwed with by those telco based ISP's.
John the Kiwi
par for the course...for most VOIP services (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you plug your fax into the right port? (Score:3, Interesting)
You need a second line to send faxes, and most of the Vonage routers have a second jack labelled FAX specifically for this. The fax line doesn't use audio compression, it receives the fax transmission as data instead of audio, and forwards it over the internet as data instead of compressed audio. The fax line is not active by default though - it's an entire second line (2nd phone number, can be used simultaneously with your voice line if you have the bandwidth). I have it and it's worked flawlessly for me.
Of course, that doesn't excuse the hoops you had to jump through to cancel. Maybe they've been subcontracting their cancellation service to AOL.
*MY* big problem with Vonage is that the online voicemail retreival is SLOW AS SHIT. But it still beats trying to retreive voicemail over the phone, at least online I can just click on all the message buttons, open them in new windows, then come back and listen to them all 5 minutes later when they've finally downloaded. At least with online voicemail, even if there's a 30-120 second latency to get a message, I can easily rewind/fastforward/replay/save to computer.
When was the last time you rebooted a POTS phone? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that mass market home VoIP service is doomed, at least in it's present form. People have been conditioned to expect to be able to pick up their home telephone handset and hear dialtone, they don't need a phone system that has to be rebooted on occasion to make it work. When the power goes out with VoIP, the entire telephone line goes down unless you have battery backup for the modem and the router. I have had to remind several family members with POTS that they need to have at least one regular non-wireless telephone in the house for when the power goes out. I understand that many VoIP routers have backup batteries and broadband providers provide battery backup for the customer prem VoIP telephone equipment that they provide. How long do those batteries last?
How long does a broadband connection last when the power goes out?
Recently there was a large storm that caused the power in my neighborhood to go out for almost two days. If I had Vonage, it would have only lasted for as long as the cable TV broadband lasted. My cable TV service and broadband connectivity lasted just a few hours after the power went out. The batteried in my UPS, which powers the cable modem and router lasted for much longer than the broadband service did. My cell phone went to analog roam after 8 to 10 hours (and that signal was essentially unusable). My wired POTS phone worked fine the whole time. I had neighbors who were surprised that my phone still worked because their (cordless) phones were dead. The same neighbors were later grateful that I could stop the beeping noise that was coming from their cordless handsets -- they also didn't know how to put the batteries back in after the power came back.