Bon Vonage – My Trip Into Local Number Portability Purgatory and Beyond

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Bon Vonage – My Trip Into Local Number Portability Purgatory and Beyond:

by Ken Pyle

February 3rd, 2004 Issue

About a year ago, I wrote an article about the inertia of customers and how difficult it is to get them to switch services and service providers. The greater number of communications’ services that are bundled together, the more difficult it is to get a person to switch. In my case, I had created a telephone services bundle from a few different service providers. It was somewhat cost-effective for the given feature set, but it meant two or three bills every month. Vonage promised to simplify everything with one package that was even more cost-effective than my cobbled together approach.

The Vonage service was nothing new. I had been closely monitoring it, as well as the service from Packet8 for at least a year. My review of the TalkPro service [see January 5th Viodi View] proved to me that the quality of VoIP could be sufficient. Further, a colleague was having a great experience with the Vonage service and reported no quality issues. Since Vonage supports local number portability, I really couldn’t see any reason not to give it a try.

For $39.95 per month (with no taxes), the business service includes a phone line with 1,500 minutes of all distance, as well as a fax line with 500 minutes of free calling. For an extra $10 per month, one can receive unlimited all-distance. Features, such as call forwarding (very useful if the power or high speed connection fails) are included in the basic service price. More importantly, unified messaging is supported, so voicemails can be retrieved via email or via telephone or cell phone. Vonage supports all of these features, plus they port my local number.

It started out so easy, as it only took a few clicks to order Vonage late one Saturday night. I immediately received feedback in the form of an email giving me all of my pertinent account information. Their email informed me that my Digital Phone Adaptor would arrive in a little more than a week, while it would take about 15 to 20 days for the number porting to occur.

So, I didn’t think too much about it, when, about a week later, an entire day goes by without any incoming phone calls. Then I get an email that indicates that I have a voicemail on the Vonage service. Ah ha, the number was ported, but I could not use it, as the adaptor was still enroute. Fortunately, about an hour later, the adaptor arrived. Connection was fairly easy and before the end of the work day, I dialed out and received calls.

Still, people kept calling me on the cell phone and telling me that my phone line was just ringing and ringing and not going into voicemail. Over the course of the next few days, I do not know how many people could not get through because of intermittent local number portability. I suspect it was intermittent, as Local Number Portability was designed for a controlled cut-over. In my case, I had the ability to get dial tone on the new line probably before the transition between carriers had occurred.

The real issue was the intermittent voice quality. It sounded great at times, but then, heavy Internet traffic would make a call sound like a cell phone. At one point, I picked up the phone and had no dial tone. I had to cycle power on the adaptor to get it working again. I tested it for several days, making and receiving over 100 minutes of phone calls. I concluded that the quality was definitely inversely proportional to the network traffic and that it was not acceptable for a business line.

I sent Vonage an email regarding the local number portability issue and the quality problems I was experiencing. I received an immediate reply with a case number. About a week later, I finally received an email reply from a real person. It provided a link and a procedure to use a shareware program to test the link from my location to their server. Unfortunately, by that time, I had already sent the Digital Phone Adaptor back, hoping to return it within the 15 day, no questions asked, money back guarantee, period.

We will see if they give my money back, since, in my haste to return the Digital Phone Adaptor, I forgot to get a return authorization number. To cancel service, I actually had to talk to a customer service representative. A live customer service representative actually answered the phone after a relatively short wait, was very friendly and explained that Vonage will, effectively, use the MAC ID of the Digital Phone Adaptor as a stand-in, return authorization number.

This service is definitely something to be reckoned with by independent telcos. Although, it did not meet my quality expectations, I have heard from colleagues (literally heard) that it works great for their SOHO applications. The quality is just going to keep getting better, while the feature set will probably keep expanding. It points to the importance of cost-competitive (not the cheapest), bundled offerings that create so much inertia that a customer will find it too much hassle to switch plans. Education (e.g. advertisements, public relations) will still be required to reinforce and remind the customer of the soft strengths (e.g. quality of service, customer service) of the local telco’s offering, so they don't foolishly switch providers the way I did.

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