Why No Caller ID for Outgoing Calls???

Posts: 153 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Jan 11, 2007 Posts: 153

Well, this is the feature request topic, so simply displaying the fact that the Vonage site sez you don't get it isn't particularly helpful.

An earlier poster pointed out why: some people just won't answer a call unless they see the name.

Just a note about how CallerID name works in the PSTN. All that is sent with your call through the network is the calling number, not the name. The telephone company delivering the call to the final destination actually has to do a database lookup in order to translate that number to a name to present to the called party.

Fortunately Vonage does do a database lookup. There are many database providers available, and they are not necessarily consistent, by the way, and they all charge a fee for each lookup.

What Vonage does not do is enter a name for each Vonage number into a database that these database providers are gathering data from. That's what we need Vonage to do. The entry _could_ be taken from your profile, since that's all that Vonage really knows about you. And that might be the problem. You could enter your name as Lord Darth Vader and make that appear on people's caller ID boxes. That might not be good.

How could Vonage make this work reasonably? Maybe the caller id name would need to be a separate entry on the Account form, and would have to somehow check against the billing credit card.

It is one of the most annoying features of Vonage service.

/john

Posts: 16 · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 7:26 pm Post subject:

well you can call customer service and request to be connected to advance Tech., they can do that for you specially if you have a business account !!!!! :P

Posts: 414 · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:23 pm Post subject:

Ghazal wrote:

well you can call customer service and request to be connected to advance Tech., they can do that for you specially if you have a business account !!!!! Razz

Uh, what? No they can't. Vonage doesn't offer outbound caller ID with name. So no matter who you talk to, you are not getting this feature at this time.

I also wish Vonage had outbound caller ID with name. If one of the reasons that they are not implementing this is due to monetary concerns over the cost of publishing the names to a database, then I would say they should even make it an optional add-on. I would gladly pay a small fee to have this feature added to my account(I would rather it be included though, of course.) Jcovert also raises a good point about the validity of the names reported to the database. I originally though this could be easily bypassed by just using the name as it shows on the billing info, but then again not everyone is using their own credit card to pay for the service(ie. Child, gift, etc...). I know other Voip companies have name display, they could look into how the other providers are doing it.

I have asked several technicians at Vonage and no one seems to know why they don't have it. It seems that their tech's don't even know. Thats a little disconcerting but in the end, I guess they have their reasons.

Posts: 16 · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:29 pm Post subject:

Trust me !!!
they can do that !!!
the engineering department can do magic if you only can contact them !!!
it is just too much tech. work for them to do so
believe me, you can show your name when you call some one, I did it before !!!! Exclamation

Posts: 414 · Posted: Sat Apr 21, 2007 10:36 pm Post subject:

Ghazal wrote:

Trust me !!!
they can do that !!!
the engineering department can do magic if you only can contact them !!!
it is just too much tech. work for them to do so
believe me, you can show your name when you call some one, I did it before !!!! Exclamation

Haha, you can't be serious. Are you a joke account or something? This is a feature they don't offer. Who is this "magical engineering department" who can turn on features that they don't have? You say that you had your name displayed on outbound caller id, well then you weren't using Vonage.

Posts: 102 · Posted: Sun Apr 22, 2007 1:33 am Post subject:

i confirmed it way before..i spoke with NJ tech support, Vonage does not support that kind of caller id feature