Massive Nationwide Outage

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Thu Mar 22, 2007 6:55 pm Post subject:

I was up and running all day yesterday, too. I had a couple of conference calls and a few people called me, no problems at all.

Posts: 94 · Vonage Forum Senior Joined: Sep 15, 2006 Posts: 94

We were down for 1-3 hours. It was a minor inconvenience, but we were still able to dial out. I just set up call forwarding to immediately go to our cell phones.

FWIW, we are in the Phoenix area (Gilbert), but our phone numbers are Western Washington (Seattle area) numbers.

I guess I'm not as upset as most people. We switched our phone lines to Vonage in the fall of last year, and this was the first hiccup. The service has otherwise been flawless, and I enjoy the benefits of Voip. There are some features that I'd like to have on Vonage that other Voip providers offer (free softphone; anonymous caller ID blocking), but all in all, I'm still incredibly pleased with Vonage. I guess I'm continually surprised by the level of hostility directed at Vonage here . . . . :\

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 7:10 am Post subject:

I've been with Vonage since July of 2005, and so far so good. There have been two large (>4 hour) outages I'm aware of and have been affected by, and a few issues with voicemail. But, overall, I'd rate my Vonage experience as very close to a landline in terms of reliability.

Of course, when problems happen, they are frustrating. Especially when they happen to a service (telephone) that is seemingly mature enough that it "should just work". But, of course, VoIP is *not* a landline telephone, it depends on a larger number of things to be correct, and there are more things that can go wrong with it.

On the other hand, it has broken me free of the Verizon monopoly, and saves me about $40-50 a month on telephone service...

Posts: 274 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Feb 09, 2006 Posts: 274

If you think an outage of a few hours or most of a day is bad, consider this...

Back in January in the large Chicago suburb of Naperville, AT&T customers experienced an outage that lasted from a Thursday to a Tuesday--5 continuous days!

Tens of thousands of residents had absolutely NO landline service during that 5-day period. Not even 911 service was working.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 8:47 am Post subject:

I'm just glad I don't depend on the TV side of my cable company for phone or Internet. I use a cable modem, but the former owners of my cable company ran a separate line for Internet when I ordered it. Then Comcast bought them out earlier this year. While the Internet side has remained pretty good (I don't think Comcast has started messing with the gear yet), the TV portion has left some to be desired.

Example.... Monday, a van drove up the driveway and the driver climbed up the electric pole, did something, and drove off before I could even walk out and see the logo on the van. That afternoon, my wife reported that the cable TV was out (thankfully the Internet worked fine, so my Vonage line was OK).

I called the cable company about 3 hours after the van left, and they set me up an "all day" appointment for Wednesday, and I would get a call 1/2 hour before arrival.

Sure enough, late Wednesday afternoon, the same (or a very similar) white van pulls up unannounced, guy climbs up the pole, does something which momentarily dropped my Internet connection, and drives off without even stopping by to see if things were working (which they fortunately were, since I'm sure he simply plugged in whatever he had unplugged two days prior).

So, two days of outage (which is more than my accumulated Vonage outage in almost two years), no explanation of what they did in the first place, and no idea whether they'll do it again... and I depend on these people for my Internet connection.

I'm thinking of paying the $30 a month for a local WiFi provider just so I can have a backup when Comcast starts messing with the Internet side of things and everything goes pear-shaped...

Posts: 274 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Feb 09, 2006 Posts: 274

I don't have to worry about Comcrap cable TV, Nate. I've been a DirecTV customer for 9+ years and have never been more satisfied, especially with all the TIVOs I have. Smile

Except for when I was younger and living at home, I have never subscribed to cable.

And I don't regret it.

I do have Comcrap Internet, however. Fortunately, that's been OK. I run fairly consistently at 8-10MB down and 740k up.

Posts: 187 · Vonage Forum Master Joined: Feb 14, 2007 Posts: 187

[quote="sheezhot"]Vonage is currently upgrading their system. I was told by one of the Cust Svc Rep who was very polite earlier and apologized for the incovenience but told her it aint her fault so will just callback this friday about the V phone. I still havent decided if I should join the Voip service except for the Yahoo online Calling feature wc is of course for Free :wink:[/quote]

If you believe that explanation, then I've got some swampland in Florida I'll sell you cheap.

Mark

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:51 pm Post subject:

Actually, given the Verizon suit, I wonder if Vonage was simply trying out their non-infringing way to connect VoIP lines to landlines, and maybe the first experiment didn't go well?

Just an off-the-wall theory...

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Fri Mar 23, 2007 12:55 pm Post subject:

UMP25 wrote:

I do have Comcrap Internet, however. Fortunately, that's been OK. I run fairly consistently at 8-10MB down and 740k up.

Wow! I get about 1.8MB down of the promised 3MB, and 190KB up of the promised 256KB. Of course, that's all based on the equipment from my old ISP, and the connection has very little lag and is very reliable (finding wood to knock on, hang on a sec, *knock* *knock*).

For cable, I have the basic 13-channel package. I don't watch a lot of TV, and it's actually the same amount as the "no cable" service charge I'd have to pay if I just had Internet. I still have the old antenna on the roof if things got really bad. (grin)

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

I've got Verizon FiOS and get the full 20Mb down all the time, and 4.4-4.5 of the 5Mb up all the time. Sticking with Comcast cable.