 Review by bbrlogue 
member for 8.1 years, 962 visits, last login: 4 days ago
updated 2 years ago
 Alexandria,Alexandria City,VA
 $20 per month "Quick shipment, quick activation of number, DND, Advanced Forwarding, ATA" "No external VM access number, VERY DIFFICULT TO CANCEL" "Solid for 5+ years, but expensive and poor customer service"
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EDIT 02/04/10: I've been trying to cancel Lingo for almost two weeks and still have not heard from their account department. We called CS every day, but the CS in India can't do cancellation and they can only forward us to the Account Department, so we would be on hold for a long time only to get a voice recording that they're not available. Tired of calling, I sent an email notice of cancellation and got a reply back from CS that someone from the Account Department would call us, but no one ever did.
I had to take the last resort: I changed the credit card on my account to a virtual credit card number (Citi) and set its max to $20 (and my last bill should be less than that). If that's not enough to cover the last bill, then they need to call me (pun intended).
No more Lingo and their poor customer service and their non-competitive pricing.
EDIT 01/04/10: Lingo has been rock solid with no issues for 5 years now. I've only had two CS call a while ago, and both resolved the issue immediately. Given that, I am on trial with Voipo and PhonePower for their cheaper service. I find it suprising that some features that Lingo has had for years are still on beta phases on Voipo, and not available on PhonePower. That tells you how far ahead and how stable Lingo is.
EDIT 01/27/06: Still happy with Lingo, but when is name caller id coming??
EDIT 12/27/04: With the help of caseydoug and voip forum, I also found out that I can program the UTS-Starcom adapter so that I can use my back up POTS line for certain calls (e.g, 911).
I have had Vonage (and still do) for over a year, and have had Packet 8 as well.
I am currently trying out Lingo and SunRocket. Vonage has been stable for me, so the primary reason for testing Lingo and SunRocket is to get two feature that Vonage doesn't have: anonymous call rejection and do not disturb. (EDIT 12/27/04: I canceled SunRocket)
So far, I am have been mildly satisfied with Lingo. Call quality is decent and I have had no technical difficulties. Numbers are activated instantly. When I signed for additional numbers on the Web, the number was activated just within minutes of pressing the submit button (compared to SunRocket, which took 13 business days to activate just the primary number!)
Customer service is so-so. I've had to deal with them twice - the first one was horrible (got forwarded to tech support by a lazy CS who didn't even forward me correctly, and then the tech support had a bad English and had trouble understanding me who was already speaking slowly and repetitively). The second experience was much better.
Their Web portal is not good, both from the performance and usability perspective. Users have to go through several clicks to get to the call details or features control. The feature control page is actually on a different server and it makes things even slower.
Their features are ok. The do not disturb feature only has an on or off setting. I was hoping I could control it to be enabled during certain time of day (VoicePulse has this). There is also no option for the caller to get pass the screen, so important or emergency incoming calls will still get rejected. (EDIT 12/27: I now use the Advanced Call Forwarding feature to do scheduled DND).
Another disappointment is the lack of caller id with name, and even more disappointing, the lack of voicemail portal numbers. Vonage has these two features and it has tons of local access voicemail portail numbers. I can be away from home and check the voicemail during a meeting or in a car, without having to call my home number and possibly disturb the family.
Finally, if Vonage has anonymous call rejection (and less critically, do not disturb feature), I would continue with Vonage. For the time being, I still prefer my Vonage service. (EDIT 12/27: Looks like the Advanced Call Forwarding and ACR feature would be enough for me to go with Lingo. Added with CallWave which I already have for $3.95/mo, I can have set it to be the VM so I get an outside VM portal).
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