Saying bye-bye to to Vonage
O’Reilly Network runs a pretty detailed article on the Vonage broadband phone service. I just disconnected my Vonage account last week after being a faithful customer for more than a year. I was using the Vonage service on a Comcast connection back in Washington state, but here in California sheer incompetence of Comcast contractors, who could not find the right cable out of four leading to my unit, led me towards DSL.
It wasn’t even the fact that my employer has a co-branded DSL offering here in Silicon Valley - Yahoo! employee perks page proudly boasted the $29.99 a month deal, and suggested the employees take advantage of the publicly available deal of $14.99/month DSL account if you sign into a 12-month contract. In fact, after digging around and asking friends, I ended up getting not the Yahoo!-branded DSL, which, according to the reports, was suffering from the relatively low level of support phone companies (in this case SBC) usually provide, but Sonic.net DSL, whose techs are somewhere here in California, and always answered my bizarre problems, like router being unable to obtain a DHCP address off the DSL modem.
Since the DSL account was not offered naked (or at least the $15/month deal required an existing phone line), I signed up for SBC telephone service, which combined with a phone card offered some pretty good price advantages over a single Vonage bundle. Granted, I lost stuff like free call forwarding, 3-way calling and ability to add virtual numbers, but that wasn’t on my essentials list to begin with, it was just nice to have for free.
Vonage was a pretty good deal (and still is, for many of my friends), except for occasional times, when you had to deal with their customer support. The quality of the service inside the US was bearable, with occasional hiccups one would experience on the cell phone. However, the quality of international left much to be desired. Apparently some logic goes into establishing the PSTN gateways in every country that Vonage offers international dialing to, and frequently my calls to my mom in Ukraine would end up with nothing but hiccups and hangups. The phone card (undoubtedly served by VOIP servers at some point), on the other hand, worked great, and was cheaper per-minute, too. I e-mailed Vonage regarding my pretty bad experience with international call quality, only to receive an automated reply that they got my message. After that it went into a proverbial black hole, which was a bit what I expected, provided that Vonage controls nothing that could impact the quality of connection.
Their system also messed up on tracking referrals, when I was signing up new customers for them. Pretty big deal, considering that they were offering two free months of service in exchange for a valid referral. Moreover, on the phone they made a stink about it being my fault, but nevertheless credited the account. Word of warning: if you switch to Vonage only because you’re dissatisfied with your current phone company customer service, don’t be surprised if you find out Vonage is cutting corners left and right, hiring support reps, whose only knowledge of English consists of the phrase “We cannot do anything, sir”, and generally not responding to e-mail communication sent through their own e-mail support system.
Overall, however, I would have probably stayed with Vonage, had it not been for Comcast failing to install cable at my current location. Just out of pure laziness I would have probably skipped the phone company setup and just plugged in that Motorola adapter they sent me.
October 16th, 2005 at 1:02 pm #athensoh
I’m now seriously considering to sign up for Vonage service, so thanks for insights. Were the calls to Ukraine always so bad?
October 16th, 2005 at 5:38 pm #Alex
It was a gamble, probably 75-25%, with 75% of the time the connection to Ukraine being pretty dismal, and other 25% quite clear and acceptable. I think I was calling the country during morning hours, when it might be the peak hour, since it’s late night in the USA, so it might not have been the best hours to call, but still, Vonage was not really good at providing quality connection and not good at responding to my complaints about it.
Several times I resorted to using a calling card from EnjoyPrepaid (which probably also runs their traffic over VOIP) from Vonage phone, just to get a decent connection.
November 14th, 2005 at 5:24 pm #Carl Townsend
I think Vonage has a big problem. I tried to transfer my business number from Qwest to Vonage, and Vonage dropped the number on the transfer. Qwest and Vonage each said it was the other’s fault, but Vonage had the authority and therefore the responsibility to be sure it was done right. It took almost two months for Vonage to restore the line and cost me over $8000 in client business. I put the log, correspondence, and everything at http://www.netadventures.biz/vonageproblem.htm.
I don’t see that Vonage has much in the way of core values or ethics, and what they did was probably illegal. I’ve complained to the FCC, but the current Administration has gone south Something about the Emperor’s new clothes I think.