jallison's Journal: Vonage

On May 3 I signed up for Vonage, my second "tour of duty" with them. The first time I dumped them after a couple of months because the DSL connection just couldn't handle the demand. We recently switched to cable, so I figured I'd try Vonage again with the additional bandwidth.

It's been pretty much a disaster. The quality of the service when it's up isn't bad. The price isn't bad. But the reliability is awful. In six weeks we've had five outages. The first time I called Vonage tech support and spent better than 90 minutes being talked through the rote "reboot this restart that plug this in" script. In the end, after finally getting transferred to second level support, I was told that it was a provisioning problem and would not happen again. Only it has happened again and again and again.

Seems that Vonage is all about attracting new customers (witness their TV ad campaign, which has got to cost pretty large $$) and not about improving or maintaining their infrastructure. There's no reason I can't get decent uptime with this solution. They're a freaking phone company, I expect 5 9's reliability. They don't come close to that.

Now it's a choice between abandoning the landline altogether and going pure cell or finding a different VoIP provider. Reading VoIP reviews is not very helpful, as it seems that every provider has fans and haters and it's really tough to tell who's going to be the most reliable.

Unofficial

[Captain Splendid]

Hit up the unofficial Vonage forums, lots of great advice and tweaks. Made my life a lot easier....

Re:

[jallison]

I assume you mean http://www.vonage-forum.com/ [vonage-forum.com]. Good suggestion, there is a lot of good information there. I did post my current woes. We'll see what happens. As I say on the forum post, it's hard for me to figure what I can change on my end that would fix a problem that often affects just one of my two lines. Seems like a hardware or network problem on my end would kill both lines. But I could be wrong! Thanks for the input.