jallison's Journal: Crappy Vonage Service

Hmmm...why is there no Vonage category? Or at least a VoIP category.

I just signed up for Vonage to support a home office now that I'll be working out of my house most of the time. I needed a second line and thought I'd give Vonage a whirl instead of having Verizon set up a second voice line to the house. So far I'm less than satisfied.

I've had a variety of problems, some of which I've debugged and some of which persist. The major problem was basic failure to get a dial tone. I finally deduced by trial and error that if I disconnected my laptop from the Linksys router that Vonage supplied that this problem went away. The "quick start" instructions that you get give you no clue that you shouldn't plug anything into those four seductive ports on the router. I will say that the router docs do indicate that you shouldn't use the router to support additional devices. This, of course, raises the question of why the ports are there. If the thing can't do anything other than support a phone, then it should have two ports: Network in and Phone out.

After putting the laptop back on the wireless network I was able to make calls. But when someone called me I could not hear them. In some desperation I checked my firewall and saw that it was logging UDP flood attacks...hmmm. Apparently it saw incoming calls as UDP flood DoS attacks and blocked them. I changed the firewall settings and can now receive calls.

The router still freaks my phone out from time to time. I have a Panasonic 2-line phone (a KX-TS3282). From time to time it will just do odd things, like beep, flash all the extension lights in unison, or turn on the intercom. I can only theorize that it's getting spurious signals on the input line. I have no idea how to fix this.

Vonage has been of absolutely no help in all this. Their web page's help is useless -- it's really just a FAQ. I submitted a service request from the web site and have heard nothing. I followed this up with two different emails on the two above problems and have received nothing more than an automatic "we got your mail" message.

This is really poor. I would guess that most anyone would plug a device into the router and would thus have the dial tone problem. The incoming call problem is even worse, because it requires some degree of network sophistication to look at the firewall logs, realize what a UDP flood attack is, and configure the firewall to deal with it. Is John Q. Public going to do this? No, so I guess Vonage is either for geeks or it's for people with very simple home networks that don't have a firewall.