After a year and a half - disappointed customer

Posts: 30

After almost a year and a half with Vonage, my service in the first year was excellent, I loved Vonage.

4 months ago, call quality was becoming a problem and I'm not the kind to play with my bandwidth saver settings and configs. Once it works I leave it alone.
Outgoing display number was hit or miss, sometimes it shows at the other end and sometimes it doesn't. Never did that in the first year.
I call the customer service and they open a ticket. Closed after a couple days but the issue was never resolved.

Call quality also started to look very compressed, especially when my outgoing number didn't show at the other end, I'm thinking I was going out from a gateway not in Canada or close to me. Anyway it's just a guess.

I do alot of calling overseas and sometimes the call doesn't go through but Vonage's smart billing system keeps charging me for the first minute or two. I try the call 4-5 times and then it connects and I talk for 10+ minutes, but still I get charged the first 4-5 times I tried. I used to submit my "request a credit" with the call transaction but in the last problematic months they were never credited, and my bills are higher than the average Vonage customer (read 300-400$ / months) because of overseas calling.

I give them a call a month ago asking why they never credited the month or two before? they tell me that I should have called, now its too late they only credit the last month's calls Rolling Eyes

on a 125$ of un-connected calls they give me 25$.
Is that how you treat a loyal and a good customer (in terms of revenue) ? I don't think so, not Vonage anyway. They don't seem to value profitable customers.

I'm using cable and the last 2 times I tested my connection with a Vonage tech my download was 5Mbps and upload ~750kbps. Using the Vonage bandwidth tester. So the blame cannot be put on my ISP. QoS was always great. So where's the problem?
I'm guessing that the Vonage gateways are still very immature in terms of Voip and the service is not where it should be, or where I would expect it to be.

I was very happy until I got fed up with the poor service that I was getting and the call quality that couldn't be fixed.
I got Videotron's service today and I don't regret letting Vonage go after all.

The only thing I'll miss is the web interface, I used it alot to verify calls and do online billing statistics.

What you may want to consider if you're thinking of getting Vonage is also important:
-911 service not the same.
-1800 calling problems
-310 numbers problems (in Canada)
-Outgoing name display
-Yellow pages listing

The positives are already marketed by Vonage. So there you go.

Good luck and thank you Vonage for forcing me to let go.

Posts: 19 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Dec 20, 2005 Posts: 19

I agree totally. I left Vonage a few months back and have never looked back until today when my Shaw Digital Phone is Down due to an outage affecting all of Southern Alberta. Shaw fixed the TV, then the Internet, and I'm still waiting for the phone service for four hours in four months, Vonage would have been a better choice, but it still would have gone down with the internet outage. Calling 1-800 numbers is nice as is being able to call 310 numbers and 911. But the call quality makes all the difference. Vonage call quality was good for a year and then became terrible. They gave me a hard time about cancelling too - it took me 5 calls before they agreed to stop billing me which was unexpected.