As some of you may be aware, we’ve been early adopters to the Vonage VOIP service for our JLOOP business phone lines. We first signed up a couple years ago when our phone service expenses suddenly went through the roof with Verizon. They were utterly unhelpful in trying to get our expenses under control. I had been using Vonage at home with solid success, so I decided it was worth a try. We also knew that we would be moving to a new home soon and Vonage would allow us to take our phone number with us wherever we ended up.

The first 9 months or so were very successful. The online control panel for the Vonage service is pretty helpful and with the ability to create call hunt sequences and also kick overflow calls to voicemail were nice additions. We did move downtown and wouldn’t have been able to keep our number with Verizon, so the decision seemed to be really paying off.

And then the troubles began. Various clients would consistently experience us sounding “like chipmunks” or with our voices “cutting out”. The problems were intermittent, so we blamed them on our bandwidth at our new location and sought out Charter Cable Internet to upgrade our speed. This seemed to solve the problem for a few months. And then the problem intensified…. and quickly. Some days nearly every phone call would be a disaster. It started that we couldn’t understand the person on the other end. Our bandwidth (3mbps down/1mbps up) was PLENTY, so we knew it couldn’t be that. We reconfigured our routers and spent many hours online with tech support to no avail.

Then the problems disappeared for a while and we hung on. Hoping that the problem had resolved itself. But alas… it returned with a vengeance, but this time in reverse. Now we could hear our callers perfectly, but they intermittently couldn’t hear us. Calls would drop or just be so garbled that we couldn’t continue them. Many days would end up with us calling people back on cell phones. (needless to say, many of us received fun surprises in our cell phone bills).

We finally were left with no choice but to end our relationship with Vonage. We had to go back to Verizon (which is not a pleasant experience). And we’ve had to change our phone number. We are in the final stages of migrating to our new numbers.

In a nutshell, we’re of the opinion that the Vonage service, while a nice option for home use (if you can stand the intermittent outages) is simply just not an option for business. I really think they shouldn’t even sell it to businesses. It is just too unreliable at this point. Probably the biggest bummer is their tech support. The scripted responses and “escalation” strategy takes hours for you to talk to anyone with real knowledge of how it works. As a technology-savvy company it is infuriating to take the leap to jump on technology like this and have no real access to technical support that is reasonable.

I also remain skeptical about the Vonage/Charter relationship in all of this. If our service was working really well, but suddenly became unruly around the time that Charter started offering their VOIP service in this area… doesn’t that seem a bit fishy?