RND(tech)

I was a happy Vonage customer up until last week. Technically, I'm still a customer, but I'm in the middle of changing over to my local cable company's VOIP service. They claim my install date is next week, so I'll keep you posted. Here's what happened:

Vonage has been great up until it wasn't. The voice quality was perfect. You couldn't tell that I was on a VOIP line or not. Chances are that had much to do with my ISP (the local cable company). I was using the two port Linksys adapter, without issue for about 18 months. I originally had gone with Verizon's VoiceWing because I assumed they'd be able to port their own POTS line number easier than any other company. After a week on the phone with Verizon, I learned sadly that they can't even do something as basic as that. So, I ordered Vonage, got a new number and went with it.

Last week sometime, we had bad thunderstorms, lightning, brown-outs and all. The Linksys adapter went dead for dial tone, but the Internet router functions were still working. After 2 hours of on and off the cell phone with Vonage, I gave up. This was partially my fault that my cell phone dropped out, but the next call was not made any better by the next support person. Yes, it was a help desk in India, and no they were not even responsive to anything but their script. They wouldn't even admit to the fact that I had just been on the line with someone else and I had to restart from the beginning of their script. Needless to say that this was fruitless until I finally yelled at the last tech. It wasn't her fault, but after two hours, I didn't see the need to continue this on my cell phone charges for a $15/month phone service. Maybe that's why Vonage sucks for support. All I wanted was an answer on what to do about a dead router. They insisted I had a MAC address conflict on my network. I'm not sure how that was on my three computer network, but sure, whatever. I suppose it's even more proof of why I'm lucky to have passed on the stock offering...