My Journey to VoIP

I’ve had several people ask me about my switch from SBC/ATT to a new Voice Over IP company. The company I went with after doing some research was VoIPYourLife.

The information and blogs that I saw said that VoIPYourLife provided higher voice quality with minimal problems.

So here’s my story:

July 7th – I talked to customer service and placed an order. The online ordering process was relatively painless and fairly quick. I had my primary number in a couple of hours.

July 12th – I received the adapter and sent in my authorization form for porting my regular number.

August 3rd – Number is finally ported – I can finish the installation. I made a switch to my telco box on the side of my house so I could use the normal phone jacks in my house. Found I could make calls, but not receive them. Called support – was told I need to contact Linksys to find out how to unblock certain ports on my internet router. Now we’re golden – seems to be working well.

Next couple of weeks sporadically people would not be able to call – they’d get a fast busy. Seems to happen for a fairly short time each time it happened.

8-16 – Sheri unplugged everything before a storm. When we plugged it back in we didn’t have service. I spend 1.5 hours on the phone with tech support, we determined that I have a faulty device. The tech tells me he will overnight the part to me. That’s good news because Sunday night I fly out for California and won’t be home to install it. I call the next day and a tech support person tells me “oh – I don’t know what happened – it was sent out ground it will be there Monday” I call home from California Monday evening- have to call my wife on her emergency cell phone because we don’t have phone service. Device isn’t there. Call tech support – “Oh let me look it up – it says it will deliver on Tuesday (probably doesn’t take Linksys that long to make one.) Finally the device arrives on Tuesday. My wife unplugs the old device, plugs in the new device – service still doesn’t work. Meanwhile the only service she has is her emergency cell phone which doesn’t have enough minutes to be used as a replacement home phone and will probably cost me a fortune. And that’s what we’re stuck with until I arrive home from California after midnight on Friday. I’ll keep you posted on the continuing saga…

Well today is August 26th.  I got home last night from California.  Learned that VoIPYourLife sent me an upgraded adapter – the SPA2100-SS.  This one supports two lines and has a ethernet connection to plug into a PC for configuration. I reviewed the way Sheri had set up the cables and made a couple of changes and was able to make outgoing calls.  This morning, I called customer support to figure out why I couldn’t receive calls.  I waited on hold for 15 minutes before giving up the first time,  30 minutes the second time, and finally got through after 15 or 20 minutes the third time.  Apparently they are having some network issues.  The tech wanted to just say that it wasn’t working because of their network problems, but I wasn’t quite ready to buy that.  You have to open some ports on your router to be able to receive incoming calls and when you do that, it’s specific to an ip address. We were able to figure out that the new device had a different ip address than the old one. I changed the ip address on the router and it still didn’t work, but a little while later when I tried calling, it did work.

So we now have telephone service.  We’ll keep you posted on how it’s working.  I don’t anticipate any further problems, but you never know.