Reports by Consumers

That's what both AOL and AT&T seem to have gotten, both with their technology and with their marketing. While Vonage takes a very Darwinesque or Jackass feel to their marketing, they have really not made VoIP as easy as either of the BIG A's.

911 service has been in the spotlight recently after a young girl was unable to use her family’s Vonage phone to call 911 during armed robbery in Texas. This has prompted the state of Texas to seek a court order to stop Vonage from advertising it offers "911 calling", and for Vonage to outline the steps need to turn on 911 service. In Canada, the CRTC has stepped into the 911 void with a decision that requires VoIP service providers to offer the same level of 911 service provided by ILECs to their existing customers within the next 90 days....

Verizon and AOL on Thursday each unveiled new Internet-based phone plans. Verizon will charge just $29.95 for unlimited calls; AOL's monthly fee is $29.99. While these two giants duke it out, they will also face competition from cable companies like Comcast, telcos such as SBC, and startups Vonage and even Skype. Call it the Internet phone wars.

You might want to check out the discussions on the Vonage VoIP Forum, www.vonage-forum.com

You may recall my Vonage rant a while back. I sent them mail to clarify the situation at that time, but didn’t hear back. (In the interim, I’ve settled on Delta Three’s iconnecthere service).

Almost two months after I sent my query to Vonage Customer Service asking about the activation, shipping, and termination charges, I finally got two responses. Taken together, they fall into the “heart is in the right place, but head is up their ass” category. Compare:

Additionally, Vonage is now advertising using popunder adds that defeat the popup controls in Safari. I haven’t checked for the same in Firefox. In any case, it does not increase my desire to buy service from them.

Vonage, a provider of VoIP services, complained that two broadband providers were causing traffic problems for them. One of the broadband providers was identified as Clearwire, while the other provider, a certain cable operator, was not named.

The VoIP provider said that last month, both companies were suspected of blocking calls and not letting some home-phone adapters work properly. Since the complaint was issued to Clearwire, Vonage calls have been able to come through uninterrupted, but the issue with the cable provider remains unsolved.

Before Vonage filed this complaint, Madison River Communications, a telecommunications provider, stated that it would refrain from “blocking” VoIP calls and was willing to pay a $15,000 fine to the government.

After some rumors that a large WISP was blocking Vonage's voip ports, it appears as though Clearwire is the WISP Vonage is investigating.

The fact remains that Vonage could have easily leveraged the ISP channel a long time ago to build their service and gain several network allies along the way. They've gone the other route and appear to be sticking to the strategy. Seems myopic to me, but I guess if you have strong profits and growth early on and have a successful IPO before the port issue turns into a court issue, you can afford the battle.

Current thread on the Vonage VoIP Forum started with a poster who complained that he received an email offer with the subject line: "MAKE THE SWITCH NOW!!" (sorry, all-CAPS are his, not mine).

The bottom of the message contained the text "Vonage.com," and included the company’s snail-mail address.

As several respondents pointed out though,the message contained an identifier for Mesa Media. Company has no Web site I could find but as far as I can tell, they are the spammer- not Vonage.

The Texas attorney general yesterday sued Vonage, the nation’s largest Internet-based phone provider, saying the company failed to clearly tell consumers its service doesn’t automatically allow them to dial 911.

The lawsuit follows an incident last month in which a 17-year-old Houston girl was unable to call 911 on her family’s Vonage service after a home invasion robbery left her parents injured. The girl ended up calling from a neighbor’s home.

The lawsuit – filed under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act – seeks to make Vonage more clearly inform consumers that they must sign up separately for 911 service. The lawsuit also seeks US$20,000 per violation of the act.

Vonage, which is based in Edison, N.J., offers details about its emergency service only in fine print on its Web site and buried inside its users’ guide, Abbott said.

Internet-based phone services such as Vonage have grown rapidly by offering low-cost calling plans to consumers with fast Internet connections. The company offers service in San Antonio and has more than 500,000 subscribers nationwide.

Even so, Abbott said Vonage’s television commercials and brochures don’t address its 911 requirements. And customers who contact the company’s call centers are not told they have to separately sign up for emergency service.

-- By the way, I switched over to Vonage to save some dough and so far, so good. It's $25 a month for unlimited calling and by the time I get all the rebates back for the $59 phone adapter I had to buy to get it to work, the adapter will be free. Oh, but had one heck of a time getting TiVo to download updates on it. It took a lot of patience and a lot of configuring. But, this isn't Slashdot. Heck, Slashdot isn't Slashdot anymore.

Vonage says it's been blocked; Company's terms of service "prohibits" use of certain high-bandwidth applications.

The company in this case is Clearwire. According to the article, "Clearwire says it reserves the right to prohibit the use of a wide range of bandwidth-hungry applications, a list that apparently includes VoIP as well as the uploading or downloading of streaming video or audio, and high-traffic Web site hosting. According to the company's terms of service, Clearwire reserves the right to restrict access or terminate service to customers who don't comply with its rules."

If you want to read a posting about experience with customer service at Vonage, Lingo and Packet 8 as well as other experiences check out Philip Greenspun's real life type of post.

Vonage will now let you keep your phone number in Canada according to this story. This is great news for Canadian customers and should help grow the Canadian market for VoIP products and services.

One Vonage customer has claimed that his calls have been blocked by Clear Wire, Craig McCaw’s fixed wireless start-up. Gerry Salemme, an executive vice president at the Kirkland, Wash.-based Clearwire, told Advanced Pipeline that “some technologies used by Vonage and other VoIP providers are problematic for wireless networks, versus a wired network.”. Salemme also confessed that he had not read his company’s terms of service. So one cannot take him too seriously. Vonage officials are clearly unhappy. However Clear Wire is not a phone company or a cable operator, so going to FCC isn’t going to help much. As a word of caution, since this is an isolated case, its time to take a little pause … after all one swallow doesn’t make a summer.

I called sales, got right through and got a second phone # to call. After 20 mins or so, I got connected with John. He was super helpful, took 90 minutes to find out that "Joe" had mucked with my box and corrected it.

Now that the MTA was connecting again, he changed my SIP port to 5065 to prevent any possible conflicts with iChat AV. I then called a vonage friend, uploaded files and it sounded ok. We then did a iChat AV while on the phone and that sounded ok. We then disconnected iChat and I uploaded a file, all fine.

Amazon.com: Electronics: Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter with Vonage VoIP Internet Phone Service Starter Kit. Hot deal at the moment. The adapter is now FREE after rebate. But you should read the fine print before actually purchasing this item. Why? If you’ve read my previous post about Vonage and other VoIP service providers, they generally charge a de-activation fee if you don’t return the hardware. What, you say? I agree, it’s fine that you have to shell out money in the beginning for hardware, but to be charged almost the same amount of money for not returning the hardware is very dubious, in the least. At least with the cable TV company, you know what you’re getting into when they say “equipment rental.” Here, you’re essentially paying for the rental of the VoIP device upfront AND you get charged the fee immediately upon de-activation. The money only gets refunded if they receive the hardware within an allotted amount of time.