The final word on Vonage
Well, it’s now been several months since we switched from traditional telephony courtesy of Verizon to Vonage’s VOIP service. The results are in and the reviews are mixed.
The bottom line: Vonage service isn’t ready for the masses, but it does look promising. The bad news is that it’s just not reliable enough — well — to rely on. On the reliability front there are two issues that Vonage will need to address before VOIP can be considered a serious replacement for land lines:
- Call quality. For the first two months Vonage provided first-rate service in terms of call quality. In fact, many calls sounded clearer than land line calls. But the honeymoon is over and call quality has experienced repeated problems over the past couple of months. These problems appear to come and go and have been documented by many people. As suggested by Vonage, I always check my bandwidth quality using both a Vonage and a Speakeasy bandwidth meter — and our 5MB down / 1.5 MB up connection always tests out fine. In fact, the Vonage speed test typically indicates that we should be able to support 12 or 13 simultaneous high-quality VOIP calls. But it’s not the case — our callers report voice dropout and clicks — often so bad that we have to hang up and resort to using a cell phone.
- Customer service. Unfortunately, Vonage customer service is very lacking. It takes upwards of half an hour to get through the hold system. Usually there is a relatively unknowledgeable person on the other end responding with rote customer service scripts — after a round of this support escalates to a senior technician. We have now had our VOIP routers updated and refreshed several times — all to no avail.
After numerous calls for support, Vonage has effectively given up. On our last attempt to resolve issues the Vonage technician did what he could — and in the end said there was nothing else he could offer. Vonage was unable to diagnose and cure the quality problems.
Going into the VOIP game we knew there would be some problems. For example, high speed modem calls are not supported — and that means our DirecTV Tivo units continually fail to make their daily update calls. This is an annoyance but, taken alone, is probably a livable situation. Unfortunately, we have also found that low speed modem calls have reliability problems as well — and that means inconsistent results sending and receiving faxes. Vonage does offer a “fax line” service offering that is supposedly rated to support 9600 baud fax calls — our results have been about 50/50 in terms of ability to send or receive faxes. We often have to ask our vendors to mail documents to us.
We also experience regular problems with incoming calls. Quite frequently, incoming calls are routed immediately to our top-level voicemail menu. In other words, the phone doesn’t ring and the caller hears “press 1 to review messages, 2 to change your greeting, etc.” This is entirely inappropriate as it gives callers intermittent but direct access to our voicemail.
If you are seriously looking into using VOIP, check out DSL Reports VOIP reviews. Even with the most highly rated service (Time Warner VOIP as of today) there is “the good, the bad and the ugly.”
One of the best resources for making a decision for or against is Vonage’s own support forum. There are extensive posts from customers — and a very large number of problems, intermittent issues and complaints. Vonage seems to be getting bigger but not better.
For those of us seeking an exclusive replacement to land lines and the high costs of Verizon (et. al.) service, I think we have a while to wait yet. The lack of consistent quality, problems with voicemail, no support for modems (such as DirecTV and fax modems) and related inconsistencies make Vonage a poor choice for business and a mediocre choice for home use. We’ll be ditching Vonage shortly — whether we try another VOIP provider or go back to land lines is yet to be determined.
