Today I had to change my Qwest set up to a Virtual Remote Forward (or something like that) just so I could keep my Qwest transfer until this number gets ported to Vonage permanently.

Other than that, I’ve been happy. I haven’t had the problem you’ve experienced but that could be a dealbraker indeed.

Chris

For that reason alone, I would encourage you to see if this problem can be resolved and to stick with them. I’ve been happy for all the reasons you’ve mentioned - cheap, and for me, efficient.

Anyway, I had no problems until the other day when somehow my VoIP router died (i don’t blame Vonage, I blame a faulty Linksys router)… so I had to call customer support. I talked to three levels of technicians. The first I could barely understand and it sounded like he was reading right out of a book. The second was a little easier to understand but had me do the same damn thing the previous tech did. Finally the third guy had pretty understandable English, he was well versed in the issue and tried some new things and quickly sent me a replacement router… how quick? I had it in like 20 hours complete with return shipping for the faulty router.

All in all, I like the Vonage service, it is more affordable than a standard phone line and I only had that one time problem so far.. I have had the service for about 3 months now, so I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

My advice to Vonage: stop off-shoring. Or at the very least fire all of your 1st and 2nd level techs, hire more 3rd level techs… and lastly, for the love of gawd, make choherent English part of the requirements for the job!

I think today I will try to get through to a non tech support person and see what happens there. I think 3 months of free service could appease my wrath.

Based on my own experience working in tech support, I know there are people in at Vonage who care about getting problems solved and who are capable of doing it. It’s just a matter of whether or not you can navigate the phone maze to get to those people. Good luck!

Having no landline or any phone at all except for a prepaid cell, I called to wait on hold (twice) for 15 minutes at a time to the tune of something like 12 bucks in charges.

So, resigning myself to a heinous Friday night wait time, I hied myself down to the local Qwest payphone and called the 800 number. And waited for 45 minutes. Only to discover that the username/password the sales rep failed to provide me with was useless unless I planned on installing Cox’s spyware and browser-hijacking software and using their email servers. All because their installation guide is written for muggles - and because I failed to heed my intuition to burn the thing and flush the ashes down the toilet. (Hey, it’s my first cable modem. I’m 18,000 feet from the phone co, so DSL wasn’t an option like I would have preferred it to be.)

The rep was quite American, knowledgable and helpful - especially when he discovered he was talking to a fellow geek that the script of “unplug the modem and wait 15 seconds, plug it back in and wait 1 minute” wasn’t going to work. But he was obviously insanely hurried and probably overloaded and obsessively watching his call turnover times.

But is that the common level of service you’re hoping for? I hope not. Holy cow.

So, when is it that we finally build that massive, global point-to-point grid network that no one actually owns and controls so we can do away with all this pay-for-access nonsense and get on with the blissfully anarchic free-for-all the ‘net should be?