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Review by Test99 
UPDATED: 3.7 years ago
member for 6.5 years, 3859 visits, last login: a few minutes ago
 San Jose,Santa Clara,CA
 $11 per month
 "Great international rates and BYOD"
 "Customer support unwilling to troubleshoot a problem."
 "Service unusable. No way to get it fixed."
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(ratings below consensus)
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My early experience with BroadVoice was rocky. There were 5.5 hours of downtime in the first few weeks of service. I was unsure whether to keep the service. Because of numerous reports on BBR that it was difficult to contact BroadVoice customer support, I waited passively at first for the problem to be resolved. When I finally did send an email to customer support, the problem was resolved within the hour and has never returned. Subsequent emails to customer support also received a prompt, friendly, and helpful response.
I don’t use a lot of features, apart from simultaneous ringing. If I understand correctly, BroadVoice has recently blocked simultaneous ringing of numbers outside North America. If true, this is definitely a step in the wrong direction. This feature is essential, even if it costs extra. The call manager, which opens in a browser window, looks like a great idea. But it is unstable. In Firefox, it pops up repeatedly for no reason. In the browsers I have tried, it usually loses contact with the server after a short time and apparently is unable to recover.
As of this writing, the web site's list of available features is not up-to-date. For example: simultaneous ringing is listed as an extra-cost option. In fact it is included with the basic service. Shared call appearance is listed as available, when apparently it is not. Caller ID name on outgoing calls is at the top of my wish list.
The thing that drew me to BroadVoice was their rates: $10 per month for unlimited in-state calls, plus the best international rates. And it is very comforting to know that if my calling pattern changes, I can log in to the web site at any time and switch to unlimited calling to 21 or 35 countries for only $10-$15 per month more. That ability to change plans online, even if I don’t use it, feels like an insurance policy. It is a big plus for BroadVoice.
The ability to bring my own device, to retain full control of it using freely provided credentials, and to switch devices at any time, are big selling points for BroadVoice. It would be hard to go back to a locked device. The ability to use the service outside the US without restriction is also an important benefit.
To my way of thinking, BroadVoice's policies are rational and transparent. They really "get" what I need in a phone service.
Update: service was unstable for the entire week starting on 2005 May 2. BroadVoice gave no clear explanation for this for many days. The service never really recovered after it was ported away from Global Crossing. Often the audio would fail in one direction at some seemingly random point in a call and would not recover. Sometimes two or three calls in succession would have one-way audio. Customer support proposed only ineffectual measures such as switching to a different proxy or adapter. At no point were they willing to consider the possibility that the problem might be related to the involuntary change of CLEC after the falling out with Global Crossing.
It would take too long to write a full description of my experience with customer support. In summary, my experience was that when they could readily identify the cause of a problem they would fix it. But they flatly refused to do genuine troubleshooting of a problem that they could not immediately identify. They automatically assumed that the problem was on my end. The fact that I had up to 8 other VOIP services operating successfully on the same network seemed to be of absolutely no relevance to them.
The set of features offered on the BroadVoice network was superb. But my dissatisfaction with customer support's troubleshooting efforts was profound. The service was unusable and there was no way to get it fixed.
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