RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
About a week ago, I decided to switch my office phone system over to Vonage to cut costs. I should be saving about 70 percent using Vonage compared to my previous Verizon landline telephone bills.
I considered other companies (mainly Packet8), but decided that for my simple needs (basically, the phone should ring when someone calls me), Vonage was a better fit. Packet8 offers some very advanced features, but I don't need them. And Vonage's up-front costs are much lower, they use an ordinary analog phone, and they throw in a free fax line. Both companies also forward automatically to a fallback number in case the Internet fails (not uncommon with Time-Warner), which was very important.
Anyway, the package with the Vonage adaptor arrived three days before it was promised, which was a good start. It worked out of the box with no configuration -- which also was good.
Except for the fax line.
I tried for the better part of two days, trying four different modems, every fax program I knew of, and a "real" fax machine to get it working, but the best I got were a few partial pages. Not a single transmission completed successfully, despite all my tweaking (and the occasional cuss word).
So finally I called Vonage Support, who answered surprisingly quickly considering it was a weekend evening, and got connected to "Mack" in India. I explained the situation and what I'd tried, so Mack skipped all those steps (thankfully) and got down to troubleshooting, interspersed with discussion about the recent bombings in India, politics, and so forth.
After attempting to send a few faxes back and forth using the fax machine, Mack decided to increase the RTP packet size from 0.10 to 0.30 (kind of counterintuitive, I know), after which the fax worked, using the fax machine.
I thanked Mack for his help and told him I would try setting it up with the faxmodem again, and he said he'd call back a little later to see how it worked and to offer additional help if needed. And sure enough, about 15 minutes later, Mack called back. I told him I'd gotten the faxmodem itself working and was just deciding which fax software I liked better, and thanked him again for his help.
About 20 minutes later, Mack called me again to check on my progress and offer help configuring the software, if needed. I told him I was all done, the software had been installed and tested, and everything was working fine. He told me he'd call again tomorrow to make sure everything was still working, and would monitor my account for a few weeks.
I gotta tell ya, I don't remember the last time I talked to a tech support guy who cared as much as this guy seemed to. Even the best tend to breathe a sigh of relief and get the caller off the phone ASAP once the problem's solved. This guy called back twice within an hour or so -- after the problem was solved.
If this caliber of support is typical of Vonage, then I think I made a good choice. In any case, it was a nice surprise to talk to someone who not only was able to solve the problem, but seemed to actually care about his job.
-Rich
I considered other companies (mainly Packet8), but decided that for my simple needs (basically, the phone should ring when someone calls me), Vonage was a better fit. Packet8 offers some very advanced features, but I don't need them. And Vonage's up-front costs are much lower, they use an ordinary analog phone, and they throw in a free fax line. Both companies also forward automatically to a fallback number in case the Internet fails (not uncommon with Time-Warner), which was very important.
Anyway, the package with the Vonage adaptor arrived three days before it was promised, which was a good start. It worked out of the box with no configuration -- which also was good.
Except for the fax line.
I tried for the better part of two days, trying four different modems, every fax program I knew of, and a "real" fax machine to get it working, but the best I got were a few partial pages. Not a single transmission completed successfully, despite all my tweaking (and the occasional cuss word).
So finally I called Vonage Support, who answered surprisingly quickly considering it was a weekend evening, and got connected to "Mack" in India. I explained the situation and what I'd tried, so Mack skipped all those steps (thankfully) and got down to troubleshooting, interspersed with discussion about the recent bombings in India, politics, and so forth.
After attempting to send a few faxes back and forth using the fax machine, Mack decided to increase the RTP packet size from 0.10 to 0.30 (kind of counterintuitive, I know), after which the fax worked, using the fax machine.
I thanked Mack for his help and told him I would try setting it up with the faxmodem again, and he said he'd call back a little later to see how it worked and to offer additional help if needed. And sure enough, about 15 minutes later, Mack called back. I told him I'd gotten the faxmodem itself working and was just deciding which fax software I liked better, and thanked him again for his help.
About 20 minutes later, Mack called me again to check on my progress and offer help configuring the software, if needed. I told him I was all done, the software had been installed and tested, and everything was working fine. He told me he'd call again tomorrow to make sure everything was still working, and would monitor my account for a few weeks.
I gotta tell ya, I don't remember the last time I talked to a tech support guy who cared as much as this guy seemed to. Even the best tend to breathe a sigh of relief and get the caller off the phone ASAP once the problem's solved. This guy called back twice within an hour or so -- after the problem was solved.
If this caliber of support is typical of Vonage, then I think I made a good choice. In any case, it was a nice surprise to talk to someone who not only was able to solve the problem, but seemed to actually care about his job.
-Rich
