Valleywag
Users of Vonage's internet telephone service have been reporting a major service failure, ongoing since Friday. The problems are varied, but it comes down to this: Vonage seems to be missing the "phone" and "service" parts of "phone service." In some cases, incoming calls are not connecting. Vonage is forwarding the attempted calls to subscriber landlines and cellphones, but repeatedly, and late. As a result, the call forwarding feature becomes a series of phantom calls clogging up the customer's only reliable phone service. Some are reporting no service at all.
An anonymous administrator of Vonage Forum, the independent discussion board where gripes were aired, reports that Vonage claims to have resolved the issue this morning, but users continue to report problems.
So why isn't the blogosphere taking notice as it did for the recent Skype outage? Despite Vonage's attempt to stay relevant with heavy advertising, the only ones who seem to care about the failing company are the numerous telephone carriers suing the company into the ground for patent infringement — and the suckers who bought into Vonage's late night television pitch.
Comments
and see i though vonage and reliability kinda went hand in hand. lol.
Post-suits, the real problem now seems to be that "Vonage phone service" is increasingly missing the "Vonage."
@92BuickLeSabre: Don't you mean it's missing the "phone service." Not sure what "vonage" is or if anyone would miss it.
@Tim Faulkner:
Well, so much for my brilliant wit. Nah, that would have just been repeating you Tim.
I just meant that it's not just that the calls aren't working (phone) or that they aren't fixing or addressing the problems (service), but that we're dealing with a company that itself is starting to vanish altogether.
Imagine one of those scenes from a movie where they go to the company headquarters and find nothing left but an empty warehouse. That's the image.
Par for the course with Vonage - I dumped them as soon as I caught wind of the Verizon lawsuit - ported my number over to an unlimited cell carrier and have been happy every since.
Vonage is the AOL of VoIP. Large marketing campaigns, terribly overpriced & underfeatured, and terrible customer service/tech support to boot. All of the newbies flock to them because of their ad campaigns and it costs them a bundle to hold their hands along the way.
IIRC, Vonage only has one data center, so if anything happens, their whole service goes down. Beautiful design for a "phone service", isn't it? Not that any of the local cable co's hawking their phone service are any better in this regard. That's why you won't see enterprise users using either one of them for VoIP.
FLCONSUMER,
So far I have had no problems with Vonage during the 16 months we have used them. Which service is better priced and has better features? I would like to find one in the event that Vonage is sued out of existence. The local cable company (TimeWarner) charges 40% more, and doesn't even provide voicemail.
Funny that this is affecting people across the board now. I left Vonage because of this back in July. I wasn't getting calls, or I was getting what seemed like "hangups" when it was forwarded to my cell phone.
In addition to these problems I also (after having a police report filed by this guy) found out that they were forwarding my calls from their NY network to some random guys cell phone.
During all of this they claimed there was no problem with their service and that none of that is their fault. Vonage and Vonage's executives are white collar criminals (literally look up their criminal history) and are just scamming the general public with a mediocre service based on technology they don't understand.
My Vonage service is fine. Other than a couple little hiccups with Caller ID, I haven't had any problems in the 11 months we've had their service. For us, the value for the dollar for Vonage service for me far outweighs any other land line phone service available. Like beartack, the other options just don't offer the value of Vonage.
@FLConsumer: Find me another phone service (traditional or VOIP) that provides me the features (anything without E911 is out of the question), reliability and price of Vonage. The cable companies and traditional phone companies are the ones that are "overpriced and underfeatured".
@spenceman01: Voip Your Life, you actually get a person that speaks English natively, and your not hold for an hour. Plus you can bring your own device, and don't charge extra for using a SIP softphone. I've not switched because of this outage. Vonage's customer service is terrible, even they're corp response escalation is from India. I first reported this outage to the consumerist on Friday/Saturday. I'm not sure why it wasn't reported sooner. BTW that so called independent vonage site is making money from Vonage somehow because mention something negative about vonage our about switching voip providers and you get banned.
I buy VoIP wholesale anymore and have my own VoIP PBX which runs several lawfirms around the state. I still do have two lines from Viatalk and am reasonably impressed with them. Can't beat the wholesale prices, but they're still far less than Vonage and don't seem to have too many issues. All 100% US-based operation. Multiple data centers.
Start a discussion:
Login with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?