New Customers, BEWARE!

Posts: 4 · New Forum Member Joined: May 19, 2004 Posts: 4

New Customers that are using this forum to investigate Vonage, BEWARE of many issues before you leave your ma bell company. I will briefly go over my issues, and hope that it may help in some way.

1) I decided to switch to Vonage, because, like most Americans, I hate my local phone company. Ordering the service was great. The sales staff has been trained extensively, and know how to make the customer feel at ease. The first problem came with the Motorola that first shipped to my home. It was DOA. I plugged it in, and no lights, no activity, nothing (do you think it had anything to do with the fact it was made in Mexico?......hmmmmm). I spent 2-3 hours on the phone with tech support, and they wouldn't accept that the unit was bad out of the box. They actually wanted to leave it plugged in overnight, and see if it would magically work in the morning. Of course it didn't, and I had to spend another hour on the phone the next day explaining what I had gone throught the night before, and finally they gave me an RMA, and sent a new one out.

2) The new modem worked great, and the credits came through as promised, and I thought that I was on my way to enjoying my new service. Then I found out that the number switch, which is supposed to take 15-20 business days, actually takes more like 30-40 business days. Vonage tries to blame it on your local carrier, but right in the transfer dates that you can track it shows that they sit on your request for 2 weeks from the time you fax your letter, until the time they forward that letter to your previous carrier.

3) Finally, after paying for the service for two full months, (it took 35 business days to switch my number, which ends up being just under 2 months), my number was switched, and I was online with Vonage as my only phone carrier. I then tried to fax, and use my credit card machine for my home based business. I found out quickly that their website is wrong when it says that it will work with most fax machines. It was a typo that should have said it will NOT work with most fax machines (just type 'fax problems' into the forum search to see what I mean). I found out after I was a customer that data calls are not supported by Vonage. (I take full blame for this one since I actually believed what the Vonage.com website said about fax calls, and assumed that if a fax call would work, a data call should work to.....not so.)

4) All throughout this experience, I had noticed small variations in the voice (warble) and every once in a while, the outgoing voice would drop out entireley. I am with Comcast, and get a download/upload speed of 3000kbps/250kbps. This is a true tested rating, I'm not just quoting the sales literature. The point here is that no matter where you set your voice quality, 30, 50 or 90 kbps, unless you have a super speedy internet connection, T3 or otherwise, you will still have voice issues like dropped calls or warbled voice. I realize that this is not a Vonage issue, it is my ISP's issue, but most consumer's need to be aware that standard high speed broadband connections will have issues with Vonage.

5) Now after being a customer for 3 months, I tried to call home today from my cell phone, and a recorded message came on saying that "the toll free number you are trying to reach has been disconnected". What???? I don't have a toll free number. It's my home phone number. I called tech support, and guess what, they hadn't heard of it before, and they would have to elevate the problem. They expect to have the problem fixed within 2-3 days.

Conclusion: I have now spent around 6-8 hours of my life on the phone with customer service and tech support working out RMA's, credits, and technical issues. The result of most of this is that my family and freinds won't call my home phone any more, and have ended up calling my cell phone because it is more reliable than my Vonage phone.

Please know that I am not writing in order to discourage you from joining Vonage, because when it is all said and done, I am keeping my account as a cheap voice line, mainly because the only thing worse than Vonage, is Qwest, my local alternative. When I signed up with Vonage, I had only heard the good, and hadn't found this forum showing all sides of the service. Vonage is a great alternative for the bulk of you that hate your current provider, and I hope that it will survive so that the infrastructure will grow to meet demand. That being said, anyone thinking about signing up with Vonage needs to be prepared for two very harsh truths:1) Vonage is in no way ready, technologically to 100% replace your current analog phone line, and 2) Vonage, being a new company, has many kinks that you will experience along the way, namely TERRIBLE customer service agents, tech support agents that don't comprehend what an IP address is, and limited resources due to quick growth (every tech issue you have beyond 'unplug the modem and plug it back in' is sent up the ladder. I truly believe there are one or two people at Vonage that understand the technology fully, and, like the great Oz, only depart some of their knowledge to the peons).

Keep in mind always to always take care, and Vonage subscribers should always BEWARE!!![/b]

Posts: 188 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Mar 07, 2004 Posts: 188

Wow, sorry you had such a tough time of if. Obviously if more people had such a hard time as you did, you would see more posts about it on this forum. My own personal experience was: first, I read up on Vonage in all the different forums so that I knew that often times the POTS carriers drag their feet to make Vonage look back (why would Vonage intentionally piss off their customers). I knew that it would take up to two months for my number to port and I was willing to wait that long. Once I received my Moto Box, installation was just as easy as plugging it in and changing my MAC Address so that I would talk to my Cable Modem. I also read about some of the reliability issues with Vonage, such as network availability and power outages. So I took some of the money that I saved with Vonage and bought a Tracfone with 1 yr of service so that I could use it in case the network went down, then I bought a UPS just in case I had a power outage. I have had excellent experiences with Vonage’s Tech Support and basically the only real problem that I have had with it is trying to call out with my DircTV Tivo. I was able to fix that problem using a DSL Filter. Overall, my experience with Vonage has been nothing but good and I recommend it as long as you understand the potential issues.

Posts: 8 · New Forum Member Joined: Jun 08, 2004 Posts: 8

I just got the service from vonage.ca about 2 weeks ago.. everything is great with it so far!!

I have Shaw for Internet (3000 down, 460 up) and have Vonage set to normal quality from the "bandwidth saver" section of the dashboard and the people I talk to don't know I'm not using a regular phone line.

I have a Windows 2003 Server as my router and I opened port 5061 and 10000-10011 to the ip of the motorola vt1005 (vonage phone adapter) and I have the vt1005 getting an ip from my dhcp server.

Everything works fine, it takes the vt1005 about 2 mins to connect and register with Vonage and I have dialtone.

When talking on the phone and downloading large files from the net, I don't notice any difference on the phone, but downloading slows down a little bit because there isnt as much upload bandwidth available, just as if I was uploading a file to a friend.

Posts: 14 · Posted: Wed Jun 09, 2004 8:08 am Post subject: no problems here

I have luckily had no such problems. Voice quality is wonderful and have never had a dropped call yet.

You have to be willing to do a little work. You don't have a service tech coming out from phone company to get you going. You are doing it on your own. It should work when you plug in box but if not you are going to be dealing with tech issues yourself.

Posts: 16 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Apr 08, 2004 Posts: 16

You are not alone in your struggles with Vonage. Interestingly when someone experiences a problem with Vonage they usually have a huge problem. There are generally no "small" issues that come up. It either works great for you and your purpose or you have a horrible experience. I am one of the horrible experience posters - somewhere in this forum is my story - but generally people here are quick to defend Vonage. Here are a couple of disclaimers.

1. I didn't say everyone is quick to defend.
2. Vonage technology is pretty good.

Everything in this forum is a data point and shouldn't be construed as the defining story. Take everything with a grain of salt, including my previous post. Understand that Vonage has a long way to go in a lot of areas.