Vonage Troubleshooting Is Not The Users Responsibility

Posts: 492

Let me make this very clear from the start, I am not complaining about Vonage Customer Care or Technical Support.

We all do this, don't deny it. We call our ISP (or send an email) and tell the tech that you are experiencing very slow line speeds and high latency, you can bet your bottom dollar that he will respond with,

Quote:

I have just tested your line and I can find no problem. I am presently emailing you a fact sheet with instructions on how to test your PC and some pertinent FAQ's.

Everyone has heard this line before, I don't care who you call nowadays for assistance with a problem. It is always your fault and your responsibility to fix. It wasn't too long ago that Customer Service gave you Customer Service.

Times change. I am experiencing a Voip problem. I called the tech. He knew less than I did and he said so. My ISP gave me the script described above. What confuses me is that I am saying goodbye to good Vonage customers because they lack the tenacity that I have. I will continue to work on a problem until I solve it. As unfortunate as it is, they are canceling their memberships before they know what the problem is. In all likelihood, this present affliction of somewhat frequent occurences in lack of voice transmission from the calling Voip may very well be caused by this Clearwater Voip opposition to our service provider. A notice placed by the owner of this forum attests to this. See: http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic4184.html It is going to take some time to stop these snakes. The courts are slow and the FCC hasn't the fortitude to extend a fine severe enough to be an incentive to stop blocking our Voip data on the internet.

I performed all the tests that are available to me in order to find some lead to the source of the problem.
1. Regular line speed tests showed that my ISP was correct. Testing clearly demonstrated that the advertised rates were available at all but the most busiest of times of the day. However, the upstream data tended to remain constant.
2. Tweak testing showed that the optimum rate that I set after using their computations was holding up quite well. There was no difficulty in data transfers and ping times were consistent with what I had measured with the PingPlotter.
3. TestYourVoIP results were almost identical to the results measured by the test at the Boston end. 4.4/5.0 is the highest attainable score for my type of Voip.
4. PingPlotter testing was run for 4 days with no sign of any unusual activity.

Where to now? A hard reset back to default specs. I had some success with this. The Voice Qos Upstream data rate was changed from 256kb/s to 512kb/s. I found this curious as I had never adjusted the Qos Upstream Rate before. I would really like some data on this function as the Linksys Guide had very little to say about it. The result was fewer malfunctions, or so it seems at the moment. Time will tell. If a faster Voice Qos Upstream rate improves the situation, lets see what it does with less data to send. I reset my bandwidth to 30kb/s down from 50kb/s.

With enough problems of this sort to enable a number of people to quit this service, you would think that someone would take notice of it. Why isn't technical support looking into it? A service announcement? An appearance by a customer rep to the forum with some answers, perhaps? Why should I have to spend a week out of my own time to troubleshoot a problem that very well may belong to Vonage? If it were just me with this problem then it would be my problem alone, but it's not. Many people are having this difficulty to the point that they are sending their phone adapters back to Vonage in disgust. I need some answers. I've been asking for a week with nothing to show. Perhaps no one knows the answer, or those that aren't experiencing it just don't care.

Posts: 1 · New Forum Member Joined: Apr 09, 2005 Posts: 1

mbhn5204 wrote:

What confuses me is that I am saying goodbye to good Vonage customers because they lack the tenacity that I have. I will continue to work on a problem until I solve it. As unfortunate as it is, they are canceling their memberships before they know what the problem is. .

I agree, it is not the responsibility of the customer to troubleshoot their service. That is the responsibility of the company we pay for the service (Vonage). Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that they have the manpower or training to handle the current problems.

Why should a customer have to have the tenacity to troubleshoot the service and make it work? That's not what I'm paying for, and I'm sure that's the attitude of all the "unfortunate" ones who cancel their memberships before they know what the problem is. They are doing it because no one at Vonage is troubleshooting or fixing the problem.

Don't get me wrong. I think Vonage has its place in the market. I've been with them since the beginning. I honestly don't know why I put up with the lack of responsiveness and poor service. Perhaps I like the snazzy new, expensive commercials all over the tv, even though I think it's bad business to look for new customers while mistreating the current ones. Perhaps I'm a glutton for punishment. Perhaps I enjoy playing the game of "will this call actually go through?"

I'd call to discuss this with someone at Vonage, but the 10 minutes playing with the multiple levels of "press 1..." followed by a minimum 25 minute wait time doesn't really fit into my schedule.