Wednesday, April 05, 2006

The truth about Vonage

Despite my desire to be, I don’t consider myself cutting edge when it comes to technology. However, last year (April 5, 2005 to be exact) I became a Vonage customer. Vonage is the big player in the VoIP market. With exactly a year of service with Vonage I had nothing but a perfect track record.

This past week I moved into a new house and Time Warner offered me a heck of a deal on a cable, broadband, digital phone (their VoIP product) package. I was happy with Vonage so I inquired about a package without digital phone. Needless to say the price went up so digital phone it is. After all, there is no point in paying for Vonage if I get digital phone essentially for free.

The number port was actually very painless as opposed to the teeth pulling I experienced in porting it from SBC/AT&T to Vonage. The only caveat? When you port a number from Vonage they apparently are not notified and don’t get a cancellation request. This is a far cry different from when they port a number for you.

I called today to cancel my service and ironically today is my 1 year anniversary with them which means it is also a billing day. So I start out with a $16 charge for service I am not going to use.

I called the main service number and after 10 minutes was told that there is a special number for account cancellation. For the record that number is 1–800–860–5491. So I call and go through the whole process of cancelling and asking how I get the charge reversed of which I apparently can’t. This is also how I found out that Vonage isn’t notified of ports or service cancellations. Apparently the onus is on the customer to know to call and cancel after the port completes.

To make matters worse they have some sort of policy by where you can’t cancel on your anniversary date or there is a $41 cancellation fee. So I wasted 35 minutes on the phone only to find out that I have to call back tomorrow.

So after being such a proponent of Vonage I am not so sure I am in fact happy with them. Their service is great, but I don’t want to get hit with all sorts of fees when I try to make changes to my account. I never needed to call their support line so I don’t know how that is, but this is just crap.

I gave some serious though about switching back to Vonage after my promotional period is up with Time Warner for digital phone. I am not so sure that is going to happen anymore.

2 comments:

Mike said...

Vonage is the worst company I have ever dealt with. The reps lie and the commercials are false. Vonage fax never worked right. They falsely charged my credit card for services I never ordered. And the list goes on and on. Check it out, I am an attorney and I wrote this blog. Anyone want to join with me in a class action lawsuit? http://www.vonage-sucks-edu.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

I have a problem with them from the first cll for information.I tried to call them to get some information on there service ,wich I will never sign up for now,Every time I call there is a guy or ga o the line who can hardly speak let alone understand the english language,that turned me off right there.