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Vonage Following is what I just posted to my blog. I hope it illustrates my experience
Following is what I just posted to my blog. I hope it illustrates my experience with Vonage, Clearwire and the whole port-blocking issue. Needless to say I'm getting a bit burned out on the whole experience.
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A few days ago I documented my trouble with Clearwire (ISP) and Vonage (VoIP Phone). Clearwire, apparently in an attempt to drive away their already nominal customer base, has blocked the ports necessary to use Vonage, the Voip dial-tone provider. My further research indicated that Clearwire may be in a deal to offer their own Voip product.
While this better explains why Clearwire has elected to block Vonage ports, it doesn’t explain why companies such as Clearwire choose to lie to their customers and bring them to a state of such anger that they drop the service. How is this in their best interest?
On the other side of the coin, Vonage was absolutely no help. My initial email to their support center resulted in a response asking me to call them for further assistance. That would have been quite a feat considering my dial tone was not working, which is why I contacted them in the first place. I responded to them saying that they really needed to better understand what service they provided in order to understand my reason for e-mailing, not calling them. My response generated a second message from Vonage support saying that I “really” need to call them to get the issue resolved. My second response was not as kind or tactful as my first.
Today, out of desperate need for dial-tone at home, I took my Vonage terminal adapter (the little black Motorola box that provides my Voip service) to work. I figured I would call them from work with the terminal adapter in front of me, and that way they could walk me through whatever configuration changes I needed to make in order to get it working on Clearwire at home.
Let me preface this next commentary by saying I have no beef with the people of India. I find them to be highly intelligent, engaging people on a personal level. However, just because a company can save money by outsourcing their technical call centers to India doesn’t mean they should. The woman who handled my call had a reasonable grasp of the English language, but very little in the way of comprehension skills. No matter how many times I explained to her that I was not at home, she could not grasp the concept. Surely if I had the terminal adapter in front of me, plugged into my Internet connection, I had to be at home.
After nearly twenty minutes of this round-robin discussion, I asked her to put me in touch with a higher-level tech…someone who could assist me in configuring the adapter for my specific ISP (that was my subtle way of asking to speak to someone who spoke my language). She obliged (purely out of her own frustration, I’m sure) and patched me through to a pure-blooded American tech-support person.
This individual was able to grasp my issue, and gave me instructions on how to configure the adapter once I got home. Normally I don’t second guess someone’s knowledge of their own product, but this guy’s instructions were suspect. In my entire database of IT and networking knowledge, I couldn’t imagine that spoofing a mac address would somehow automagically change the port of an internal service.
My suspicions were confirmed and at present I am still without phone service. At this point I am through with Clearwire, and also seriously reconsidering Vonage, which is unfortunate. When I’ve run it on any other high-speed connection, it worked flawlessly. It certainly isn’t their fault that Clearwire is (illegally?) blocking ports, but the way they have handled my situation doesn’t give me much confidence in their ability to handle future problems which they may, in fact, own.
In my opinion, Vonage has washed their hands of the port blocking issue and has left their customers holding the handset. They certainly don’t act like they want to take the lead in getting this issue resolved, and as a customer for over a two years, they stand to lose me. Regardless of the value inherent in their system, it loses all value when it doesn’t work…regardless of the reason. Just as an example….if oil companies suddlenly stopped making unleaded gas, it wouldn’t be the automotive industry’s fault…but I still wouldn’t buy a new car knowing I couldn’t use it, no matter how great it might be. [I]
Read The Full Thread: Is my ISP blocking my VOIP?
• I have had Vonage service since April 2005, and up until now the service has been
• where do you live? and what do you mean by "blockage"?
• I live in Monrovia, CA.
There is a 100% packet loss and the latency jumps through
• Holy cow.. I have the exact same problem and my provider is also Champion Broadband.
• It is almost impossible to get a supervisor on the line, (asleep at the wheel),
• Funny mine started the same time, Monday August 1st, and I too have the PAP2, but
• Hi Chatter: Which supervisor said that they are aware of the problem.. the Vonage
• [font=Arial:f1acb43eb5] I just got off the phone with a Vonage Tech and it is important
• Our cable companies modems are DOCSIS 1.1, which Vonage said was compliant. We
• The Champion Broadband supervisor, said they were having problems with two servers.
dknighton posted "Following is what I just posted to my blog. I hope it illustrates my experience" on 08/09/2005 |
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