I’ve been using Vonage as my VoIP provider for 3+ years now. For the last 2 years I’ve stayed with them mostly out of laziness, rather than happiness with teir service. Being in Argentina, it was great to have a VoIP service that made calls to the US cheap and allowed me to work on SCALE. While abroad I didn’t want to risk a chance of losing my number while switching providers. Over the years there have been a number of issues, but for the most part the service “worked”. Every time an issue came up a quick e-mail to their CEO (thank you google for helping me find that e-mail address), copying the BBB has helped me resolve the issue quicker than my research into porting my number progressed. This however has changed recently.
What changed?
1) Vonage phone and e-mail support have always been subpar, but it seems that over the last year or so they’ve started routing all e-mails and phone calls through a call center in India or the Philippines first, where their staff is likely cheaper, but definitely not trained as well as their more costly american counter parts. These foreign call centers ONLY read from scripts. If I ask questions not listed in their script they often pretend not to hear me. They try everything they can think of to avoid transferring you to their better paid and better trained counterparts in the US. Since I usually am able to go for a few months at a time without dealing with Vonage reps, this has been bare-able, but recently a number of technical issues (see bellow) have had me stuck speaking with these call centers rather frequently.
2) I make very heavy use of 2 Vonage features Simulring and Network Availability, but starting recently they started to conflict. These features are similar , but have very different purposes.
Simulring allows me to have a number of other phones ring at the same time as my Vonage number, by forwarding the calls . This feature allows me to leave the house and still receive my calls, but it only works if the Vonage device is plugged in and able to connect to Vonage’s servers. So if I’m traveling and have my Vonage device unplugged, or if power / internet at home are out and my device can’t register with Vonage the calls go straight to voice mail instead of being forwarded to the numbers listed under Simulring. This is where Vonage’s Network Availability feature is support to take over.
Network Availability is supposed to kick in only when the device is unable to register with Vonage’s servers. So if as described above, the device is not connected to the internet, turned off, etc, it will foward all calls one alternative number the account holder can specify.
Combined the 2 features above ensure that I almost never miss a call. Something that is quite critical when doing sponsorship sales for SCALE. on call, or expecting an import call. However, as mentioned above they recently started to conflict, resulting in me receiving two phone calls for every indvidual call that comes in. Yes, you read that correctly, for every phone call I receive on my Vonage device, my cellular phone receives TWO phone calls. The first call is valid and allows me to speak with the caller, while the second call comes in 30-45 seconds after I’ve answered my phone and contains only dead air. The second call always shows the same caller ID as the first. I’ve confirmed this is a Vonage issue as if people call my cel phone directly the issue does not exist.
I’ve spoken with a number of Vonage representatives, including their executive response team, and been told that their engineering team, advanced tech support, and ERT team have confirmed they are able to duplicate this problem with other Vonage accounts / devices. However, their executive response team has decided that the issue will not be resolved in the foreseeable team.
Anyways, those are my 2 major complaints at this point. Not to mention that 3 times during the process of troubleshooting this issue staff members have tried to convince me to go to BestBuy or CompUSA and buy a new Vonage device as a solution to this, even though previous reps had confirmed it was an issue on Vonage’s end and independent of the actual ATA I was using.
Anyways currently, I’m strongly considering porting my number Teliax or another VoIP provider for my incoming calls. This would allow me to bring all my telephony services into on Asterisk based PBX. I already use Asterisk to receive calls from Argentina using a DIDWW account, and Broadvoice to terminate calls to international destinations. I was only using Vonage for incoming calls here in the US as they unfortunately was never interested in allowing us to use other SIP devices to access their service. When I pick a new provider, I’ll make sure they don’t silo me into to only using their devices as Vonage has done to me in the past. Hopefully, Vonage will allow my number to port to the new provider and I won’t have the same issues others have had. (1, 2, 3)
