Not worth the trouble

Posts: 54 · Full Forum Member Joined: Aug 07, 2004 Posts: 54

I've been a Vonage user for a long time. I recommended it to a lot of relatives a few months after I got it, too.

Well, a lot of people I recommended tried it. Most had problems with crappy audio. Only 1 out of 10 remains with Vonage, My Dad. He has garbled audio a lot, because I can hear it when he calls me.

I really loved Vonage when I first got it. I touted it to everyone. Unfortunately, call quality has gotten worse and worse for me over the last year.

It is a combination of the hardware and ISP. I'd say most of the fault is my ISP, Comcast. I have the gold tier with comcast, 8M/768k. Still we get garbled audio. Incoming and outgoing. No PCs on my networking even using the connection. I've had techs for Comcast come out, work on the lines. They'd fix something, things would be great for a few weeks. Then something else would come up. It just seems like Comcast ISP in my area is not reliable enough for Voip. In fact, it seems like this is the problem for most people. Broadband connections are nice and fast, but not consistant.

It seems like Vonage's voice adapters all have some quirks. They seem to be all different by none of them are what I would call "Great". I've tried Motorola VT1005 (almost the best but intermittently flakes out.), PAP2, RTP300 (2 of them).

I'm on vacation. My wife complains of garbled audio. When I call work, co-workers complain, intermittently. Today, my connection must have gone down, because calls were forwarded to my cell phone for a few hours.

I've spent numerous hours on the phone with Vonage and Comcast.

I'm at the point now, where if I can't this working reliably this week. I'm going to go back to Qwest. I just can't take the hassle anymore. We'll see how it goes.

It may be cheaper, but the stress from my wife complaining and people not hearing me is not worth it. Maybe I'll try again in a few years or something.

Posts: 70 · Full Forum Member Joined: Jun 17, 2004 Posts: 70

3 different ISPs, 2 moves, 2 different states, and just over 2 yrs on Vonage. I've only had a couple of minor issues, all of which Vonage tech support has been very responsive & fixed easily. Even 911 has transferred over easily. And I'm still using the old Motorola router.

Posts: 1715 · Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 6:04 pm Post subject:

While it's not been 100% smooth saililng with me & Vonage, I practically live on the phone (as in, try spending 19 hrs on the phone in 2 days) and make far more calls than most people. For me, Vonage has worked when everything else has failed. My Sprint land line has been down a total of 16 days this year, my cell has been down for about 5. Vonage has been up every time I've called. I've used at least 8 different ISPs now in about 16-20 different locations without a hitch. Seriously, the only time I've had iffy audio was when I was attempting to use Vonage over a dial-up (56k) connection... With the bandwidth saver cranked down to 30kbps, it actually does work, but sounds much like a cell phone.

That said, I know my ISP connections at these locations is up to 'snuff and is as close to perfect as it gets. The problems that most people have with Vonage are due to their ISP, not Vonage, but they have difficulty understanding this. It definitely helps that Iunderstand TCP/IP. I'm sorry that there's customers who don't understand how these systems work, and don't understand that a bad Testmyvoip.com score is due to their ISP, not Vonage. Vonage doesn't even have any affilliation with that website. Get after your ISPs to provide the service you're paying for. I know the ISPs' tech support people are borderline useless, but enough complaining and they'll get off their butts and fix things.

Posts: 2 · New Forum Member Joined: Dec 04, 2005 Posts: 2

quigs72 wrote:

I also think that getting it out in the open will hopefully get Vonage and other Voip providers to provide a better service. I'm not the only one that's dissatisfied with their service - look around the Internet, there's tons of us.

Well, for the "majority" of Voip customers, I think that 27 dollars a month is a steal for unlimited phone service when you compare it to the 20-40 dollars more you would spend for a standard telephone line (regardless of what kinks you may have to iron out along the way). Voip hasn't been around long, and it will get better with time-whether people complain about it or not.

Posts: 10 · Vonage Forum Associate Joined: Oct 10, 2005 Posts: 10

I had problems with people hearing me when i was doing anything on the net as i talked on the phone.. switched to FiOS and with the 2Mbit upload..and 15 down... no problems anymore..

Posts: 164 · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 10:27 am Post subject:

Ive kept quiet for a bit but the last post was right on. The OP stated that Vonage is not for everyone (or something to that effect) and I could not agree more. But I disagree with the theory that more people have problems than those that dont (have problems). The ones that have no problems will not post or seek out a forum like this for ranting and complaining while those with problems want a place to rant and rave - oh we see a lot of that here. Vonage does have problems and there are people that need CS support. But that us true of the computer industry and all telephone companies.

Most problems can most likely be traced back to the ISP or network setup. When I got my cable service in 2000 my ISP - OOL made it clear they do not support routers and if you have a problem that needs troybleshooting the computer must be hooked up to the modem. I say that because there those in this forum that want Vonage to troubleshoot their routers and home networks and there is no way a Vonage cs rep should have to and be able to fix all situations.

When you get any Voip service you become the phone company cause there are no Vonage trucks driving around ready to fix your network setup. Isnt this why you signed up in the first place?

I got weary of the posts that say Vonage is the worst and they are going to this and that Voip or POTS but when you troubleshoot it they have poor upload speeds, perhaps file sharing issues, complicated network setup or phone issues. The user should be capable of repairing the network and phone network in their home.

I've had Vonage since August and have had some minor problems, nothing too serious and I pay $18 per month - in comparison to my former monopolistic POTS phone company where I paid $58.81 in June for 92 regional minutes, 154 local minutes and 38 long distance minutes - total of 284 minutes. A cool $40 savings every month.

Posts: 2257 · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 10:56 am Post subject:

bg4 wrote:

I got weary of the posts that say Vonage is the worst and they are going to this and that Voip or POTS but when you troubleshoot it they have poor upload speeds, perhaps file sharing issues, complicated network setup or phone issues. The user should be capable of repairing the network and phone network in their home.

I agree with you there.. up to a point.

Obviously, bandwidth and low latency are REQUIREMENTS for Voip. If more people used sites like testyourvoip BEFORE signing up for Vonage, then Vonage would have happier (or at least more realistic) customers. On the other hand, Vonage doesn't go out of their way to "prequalify" customers, either, and their entire marketing scheme is an anti-geek rant. If you take the geeks out of the picture, as Vonage is trying hard to do, then you have to expect to handhold people more.

Their target audience, as per their campaign, is people who just want to plug the box into their existing network that POTS supports. So in many ways, they are recruiting the people who will need help.

I understand that what Vonage is trying to do is tricky. Making a little tiny box support all the fanciful caller ID situations that a large switching building would normally be responsible for is no mean feat, and I respect the inroads they've made.

In my case, I was rather peeved that they pretty much ruined my Vonage-supplied router as a router a couple of months ago, after having it perform like a champ for so long. But the $50 I spent on a real router is a couple of months' savings on Vonage, so I'm still ahead in the end. And, of course, mostly geeks would push their routers as hard as I do mine. Wink

Posts: 533 · Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2005 3:37 pm Post subject:

Whenever someone asks me about Vonage I give the service great reviews. However, I do always put an asterisk by that and let them know they must be willing to put up with a glitch here and there. Mine so far have been minor - DTMF tone here and there, loss of CID for a while, not much else, for others it's been worse (which is obvious if you read this forum.)

I'm not trying to be sexist at all by this comment, but from my experience in personally hearing from other Vonage users and reading this forum, that women are quite intolerant of those glitches. Most of the guys don't care, but there seems to be a recurring theme of how the wife is upset about a minor issue. I'm not saying they don't have the right to be either, I'm just saying you have to be able to accept the occasional glitch.

This has been touched on a bit in this topic, but most of the major issues are not related to Vonage itself. It's the home network setup, poor Internet connection, etc.