Review by veldy 
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 10.3 years, 254 visits, last login: 1 days ago
 Minneapolis,Anoka,MN
 $12 per month (24 month contract)
 about 1 days
 "Voice Quality! BYOD! Options and now support!"
 "At the moment, none. They had a rough patch from July to January 08."
 "You can't find a better company if you need a full-time phone with good voice quality and features at a good price."
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(ratings match consensus)
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[2-5-2008] CEO of Viatalk made an announcement of quality and support improvements and immediately followed through on it. I really don't know how he did his magic, but things got MASSIVELY better. Viatalk is again the company to beat! I can't recommend them more. Tech support is again responsive both via the phone and via a ticket, even when severity is not high. I keep quizzing my family asking if they have any complaints (my Wife used to constantly complain about echo ... calls not going through, etc) and there have been none. Now that my Daughter knows she can transfer a call already in process to her cell phone and continue on the run she is even more pleased than before! FAX is working for me 100% on my PAP2T-NA (which doesn't support T.38) and it also works 100% on my SPA2102 (which does support T.38). They have also been very responsive to customer complaints/wishes (like not liking to pay the monthly "fees" for E911 and recovery ... I personally think they are reasonable) and have offered to allow customers to pre-pay them in advance as well. So, Viatalk has become the high quality provider they were before the Sun Rocket implosion and further, they have become a very dynamic company working with their customers both proactively and reactively. I could not be more impressed with the changes.
If the high quality customer service continues [and if I have the need to use it again], I will come back here and up the rating to 5; the only reason I did not was because customer service was rather poor after the Sun Rocket implosion when they took on a few too many customers to support [infrastructure was OK ... just a lack of CSRs].
A++
[1-6-2008] Well, Vonage messed up and didn't port my number. Why? Because I was a previous customer and they had a system glitch that didn't remove it from the system. What that amounts to is that any Vonage customer since I have been with Viatalk has NOT been able to call me! Bah ... that is a serious bug! Well, they cleaned up that mess. So, I decided to mess around with my Viatalk service again and dug into my Linksys SPA2102. Well, somehow provisioning was enabled [I am a BYOD customer and it should never have been enabled]. Anyhow, I shut that off, pointed to chicago-1b adn everything seems great. Clear calls, fast dial [no more hangs of silence] and incoming is quick. Even a call to voicemail was fast. So, I will give it another go. I increased my rating of reliability and call quality since both improved with the server reassignment. I will keep my review updated as needed.
[5 days ago] I am a BYOD customer. I love all the features! Customer CallerID and custom call forwarding are two that I used a lot.
Initial configuration was straight forward and worked wonderfully once I determined that SIP must be given priority in QoS and UDP ports 69,16384-16482,5060-5061 forwarded to the ATA ... 5060 being line 1 and 5061 being line 2 (which is configurable in at least the Linksys 2102 ... see below). I have never been able to determine if forwarding the ports 69,16384-16482 matters at all.
I started with a Linksys PAP2T which began suffering over heating problems [line would just be static until we rebooted it] and went to a LInksys 2102 which worked fabulously for months (behind a router with SIP QoS and the proper UDP ports forwarded to the ATA). Then, occasionally, certain dialed numbers failed to connect and just left us with dead air (this was widely reported, but denied by Viatalk for awhile before finally acknowledging we are not all quality Internet deprived individuals). Or, occasionally, certain numbers we called resulted in a fast busy. Calling the same number from our cell phone would result in success [and paid airtime usage]. From time to time, we would get annoying echo problems .. even with echo suppression maxed, but that is most likely network conditions [tough to say whether from Comcast or Viatalk]. Often, the phones would be working just fine and incoming calls would hit our cell phones [service down forward], but we would immediately call the Viatalk number and it would ring!
In short, it just wasn't a reliable service. In spite of all the features and the excellent price, my Wife couldn't deal with the issues any longer and we ported back to Vonage [still in progress].
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