Getting frustrated with dropped and silent incoming calls

Posts: 31 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Sep 16, 2005 Posts: 31

Hi,

We have had a business account with Vonage now for 18 months and I am convinced that the large drop in sales orders we've experienced in that time is largely due to all the technical problems with dropped calls from customers, being unable to hear the caller or the caller being unable to hear us.

One regular customer said he's fed up with the number of failed calls to us over many months and says he placed orders with our competitors in the past because of it. He said it's at it's worst between 12pm and 3pm (why these times?).

To try and reduce the number of failed calls, we've got rid of 3 of the 5 Linksys RT31P2 boxes, and use the Simultaneous Ring list to get the Primary Vonage number to call 3 x BT and 2 x Virgin Media/NTL land line numbers in addition to the 2 remaining Linksys box numbers. The problem is that even getting the calls directed to land lines doesn't fix the problem of sometimes getting total silence on the end of the incoming call. Why is this? As the incoming landline call is is not coming down the Broadband connection, why do we get sometimes silent calls? I assume the problem must be at Vonage' end.

What on earth else can we do to get this problem solved? I can't believe we are the only business customer suffering.

Do Skype business users suffer the same problems?

If anyone can help us, we'd be very grateful, otherwise we are going to have to dump Vonage and go back to BT landlines only - despite the higher cost just to stop our company going under.

Regards,
Mark

Posts: 120 · Posted: Sat Mar 24, 2007 10:41 am Post subject: Internet connection

That really sounds like your internet connection is loosing packets, use the speedtest to check that.
Also, be sure that your wiring and config are correct as this will also cause problems, and lastly make sure your firewall on the Vonage/Internet routers are not blocking the voice packets as this will also cause drops/silent calls. Get your IT people to have a good look at your set up.

Posts: 37 · Vonage Forum Junior Joined: Jun 19, 2006 Posts: 37

avondale, we get the same problems as you mention and we've tried all the things suggested by skin06. The speedtest shows that we're not loosing many packets, the wiring and config are fine and the firewall isn't dropping packets.

We only use the Vonage lines for incoming calls and these are immediately diverted to our old BT numbers so that customers don't suffer the dropouts and poor quality. This does mean that we can't always identify the calls because Vonage still insists on adding a leading zero to the Caller ID. We've kept the Vonage numbers only because we had advised customers of the new numbers, after an initial trial that showed the service was acceptable.

Basically, Vonage's service is a rip-off; it's not much better than two tin cans and a bit of string, and complaining gets you nowhere.