Review by HardCoder 
UPDATED: 1.4 years ago
member for 3.3 years, 1522 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Raleigh,Wake,NC
 $14 per month
 about 4 days
 "Great price, ever expanding feature set"
 "Reliability, call quality"
 "Not what it used to be"
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Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Before getting in to the review, my network specs are:
ISP - EarthLink, 5 Mbps DL, 384 Kbps UL
Cable modem - Motorola Surfboard SB3100
Router - WRT54G v4 running DD-WRT v23 SP1
ViaTalk has been a very good service since we signed up back in July. I had Vonage for 2.5 years, switched to SunRocket for about 6 months, and switched to ViaTalk about 3 months ago. Overall ViaTalk has been the best for us except for their network upgrades a couple months back.
Good:
- Call quality is very good. Overall better than both Vonage and SunRocket IMO. No pops and clicks like SunRocket, and seems clearer than Vonage. I can't tell the difference between VT and POTS except the occasional garbling of voice, but I can deal with that. I'm certain it's the network provider anyway, as I've had this with VT, SR, and Vonage.
- Price. I'm on the monthly plan, but I pay about $14.15 per month right now because I got a year for $99. I also added a Virtual Number and Priority Support (which is quite nice). It's a great deal.
- Easy install. Incoming and outgoing worked right away.
- The PAP2 is a great device. Because I have admin access (a no go with SR or Vonage) I can add a second provider if I wanted.
- Failover. Not so with SunRocket (yet).
- Network reliability. Outages were a problem while I had SunRocket.
- Customer support has been fantastic. I have Priority Support. I've only called once, but was connected pretty quickly to someone ( 1 minute) who was very friendly and helped me a great deal. I had accidentally cancelled a Virtual Number online, but I was able to get the same number back when I called in.
- Softphone access. I haven't had a great use for this, but I have used both X-Lite and SJPhone and both work great.
- Features, features, features. And they keep coming.
- CEO posts here. Seems to really care that his customers are happy.
Bad:
- Couple of short outages and features not working due to their network upgrades a couple months back. It seems to have settled down now.
- The cancellation policy has been sited numerous times. It does suck. But I'm on the monthly plan and added a year for $99. I'm out, at most, $50. However, I added the yearly a couple months back, so my cancellation fee will be less than this. It's not unreasonable IMO, just less friendly than SunRocket.
Overall, I believe ViaTalk is the best provider I've tried, especially factoring in the price. Failover was a big feature for me that SunRocket did not provide. ViaTalk has been our POTS replacement, and as long as everything behaves as it does now, will be for a long time.
UPDATE 6-19-08:
Ported my number to ATT Callvantage in October 07. I saw what happened to Sunrocket and believe that Viatalk could be headed the same way. Way too many problems late last year after the SR collapse and I don't think they've really been fixed due to the complaints I still see. It just looks like they're in over their heads and can't get a handle on things. ATT CV has been reliable since the switch. I'm hoping it stays that way as this is my 4th provider now for POTS replacement. It costs more than VT, but it just works, which cannot be said of VT much of the time.
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