Review by ronbo2000  UPDATED: 94 days ago member for 7.8 years, 133 visits, last login: 10 days ago
Rosemead,Los Angeles,CA
$11 per month (24 month contract)
about 1 days
"Easy installation"
"Ease of adjusting settings you still have to call it in. Customer service not fully trained"
"If you have simple setup at home, one PC no network stuff, this is easy otherwise, prepare for some work"
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I decided to give TMo@Home a try. I am currently with Vonage and have been re-evaluating the cost associated with their service. I make land line calls during the day since TMo cell plan does not go free until 9PM.
Anyway, went to the corporate store and signed up for it. Got it and peruse through the quick install guide and went to work. The TMo@Home device is a Linksys UTA200-TM. Instructions are straight forward and simple to follow. However, if you have setup like an FTP server or Port Forwarding settings, for example, do make screen shots your settings or you might lose them in the process like I did.
Since I am still with Vonage and am using the Vonage as the main router, I set the Vonage unit as a DHCP per TMo's instruction and inserted the Cisco HiPort in between the DSL Modem and the Vonage device. Set up settings per instruction.
With the device connected, powered up, I tested dial tone. Both the Vonage and HiPort device has dial tone. Cool. Total setup time is about 30 minutes or less.
I then proceeded to review feature setting for the TMo@Home service, in particular conditional call forwarding. My existing Vonage setup uses call forwarding when I don't pick up my home line to my GoogleVoice line. I have GV set up to ring me at phone specific numbers so I could be reached.
That's where the problem started. For some reason, there is no number of wait or number of rings that could be adjusted by the customer (very much unlike Vonage). You had to call that in to be changed. I search TMo website but no real answer. I called and got passed on to 4 reps before I could get an answer. Total time spent on calling about 3 hours. You would think TMo would have at least invested time to train their customer rep. From the voices I have talked to, it looks like they outsource their customer service so my call literally went from one country to another. Anyway, just be prepared for that one and as one tip the final @Home TMo rep stated, insist on getting the @Home rep the first time and don't give them your info so you get past through the red tape.
After the conditional call forwarding setting was clarified and setup correctly. I can now say my TMo@Home service is ready for its user testing. I have a month to test but I will only use about 10 days of that because I want to port my Vonage number over to TMo.
I will add updates to this posts (hopefully I can) in the next couple of days.
Oh, by the way, as I stated earlier, I lost all my original custom settings and have yet to work that out. When I was talking to the TMo@Home rep, they said, they only deal with the phone service, if I need help on the network side, I have to go through Cisco/Linksys. Oh hell, I don't want to spend so much time on the phone. I will eventually figure it out, I just wished I did screen shots of those settings.
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