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I needed a solid incoming provider for my Asterisk setup in addition to my primary Vonage setup. I played with Stanaphone but am having continuing trouble with call quality. I signed up with Broadvoice a little over two weeks ago. Signup was instant, within a few minutes I was able to receive calls on my Asterisk Server. The incoming call quality is excellent. Sounds like the person is standing next to me - even better than on my Vonage line. I like to ability to have two simultaneous calls. Also great is the web portal with a lot more features - and the ability to set a lot of those features with * codes directly through the phone instead of logging into the website. So far I had no problems and not a single call that didn't go through (the first couple of days I called myself 10+ times a day to make sure it's solid)... I'll update the review as time passes - so far it's a thumbs up... member for 21.8 years, 11161 visits, last login: a few hours ago lodged 18.7 years ago
I got BV back in Dec '04 - the setup was great, I'm a pretty technical person when it comes to this type of stuff, so I never really had to call them for a while.. then some small problems happened, tried to contact them via the number and I'd be on hold anywhere from 5mins to 3 hours (I just put it on speakerphone)... well most of those calls would auto-hang up on me after about 10 mins (I can understand that if it was a toll-free number, but gosh). Anyway, once you DID get ahold of them, they were pretty good and usually fixed whatever it was that needed fix'n right there on the spot.. well apparantly, they grew and grew and grew, but custome service didn't... Back in May they had many outages and once for over 10 days in a row. NOTHING was told to the customers, NADDA ZILCH.. so I cancelled... I frequent www.voxilla.com and you can see the masses of complaints on there with this outage.. now I know now that it wasn't really BVs fault with them going down.. but what was their fault was a lack of ANY sort of communcations for such a long time. People say well VOIP is a new technology blah blah.. this had nothing to do with that.. it was something else and it was something to do with their provider of numbers (Global Crossing).. and the fraud going on.. this was all spelled out many weeks after the massive outages... I mean if they would have emailed me, or put something on the web site stating that there is a problem and you can get a new number here and be done with the outage, then I'd still be with them - even with the crappy customer service (as in not enough people to answer the phone). I'm currently using Asterisk now, not even SIP any longer, happy with my current IAX provider - so I really don't have any plans to go back to them, but if I were just using a simple SIP device, I'd consider going back to them when they got their crap together in the next year or so. member for 23 years, 288 visits, last login: 2.3 years ago lodged 18.7 years ago
I've been a Broadvoice customer for about six months, but I don't really use my line all that much, except when talking to friends in Europe, so I can't comment about the quality. I'd say it's about as good as Skype or a bit better than a cell call (SPA-1001, SBC DSL, 512down/3.0 up). I don't know if SBC is treating their packets like crap or not, but audio quality has yet to be a major problem for me. What I really wanted to write about is to rave about how good the customer service experience was that I just had. I am shocked and amazed, as most VOIP providers telephone support is notoriously bad. I'm travelling in europe for the next month, and to save on weight, I just wanted to use my line with a softphone installed on my laptop. I call broadvoice up, navigate the phone tree, a human being actually picks up on the SECOND ring. No holds. I tell the guy what I want to do and ask him for an auth password so I can register my Xten-Light. He gives me the pw, tells me a little bit about operation, and then volunteers to wait while I install and configure Xten to register my account. Simply amazing. Next, I asked him for some other technical stuff about my SPA-1001, and he gave me the information I wanted just as soon as he understood I was probably clueful enough not to break anything (one quick question). I have never had such good telephone support overall (lack of hold times, getting to the right person immediately, no guff, everything understood) from *any* service provider, be it telco voice, telco isp, cellular, or whatever. I don't know if it was the planetary convergence and I just got way lucky or not, but I felt obligated to share this with the rest of you. Paul member for 18.8 years, 19 visits, last login: 12.8 years ago lodged 18.8 years ago
I've been with BV for a little over 6 months now. I suffered through their "Telco provider" issues. Seems a few months ago, Global Crossing decided to cut their service. I've had a couple of issues where I needed to contact their support. Both times, the person I talked to was nice enough, but didn't fix my issues. Both times a ticket was created and esscallated to the next support tier. They are suppose to give you a call back, but the didn't in both cases. I even wrote a scathing e-mail threatening to cancel my service if the didn't reply. Still, no reply. Alas though, since their so cheap, and one of the few BYOD providers, I'm still with them. They're a good provider with many features. Just be prepaird to solve your own issues. member for 19.2 years, 22 visits, last login: 15.6 years ago lodged 18.8 years ago
I have had the service for 8 months and like what I have. The plan I have is Unlimited World. My wife's family is in Australia and we make tons of calls to Australia. Currently we are in Australia and we have easily hooked up our telephone to the DSL line here and can make or recevie calls effectively. This service has made the cost of calls to our family cheaper from the previous service we had. However there are some instances when the service has quality issues. Overall the service seems to be improving and expect even better from the future. member for 18.8 years, 2 visits, last login: 15.5 years ago lodged 18.8 years ago
I bought a sipura spa 3000. Included was a coupon that provided the first month free and exoneration of setup costs from Broadvoice. Cost for the sipura was $100. It was a pleasure and a surprise to be able to be able to make a call within a few minutes. Further, it was also a major advantage to be able to unlock the ata and make whatever changes in the configuration I wished. When I called the support line I was connected to a knowledgable person within a couple of minutes. Given the complexity of configuring the spa3000, I couldn't recommend this route for anyone a bit technologically challenged. Since you can choose the the best of the codecs, the g.711, call quality should be consistently good. Alas, it isn't as good as vonage, or I haven't yet figured out how to tweak the spa3000 to achieve this. Call quality is variable, especially for calling international numbers. I hasten to say that I mean calling countries with good telecommunications infrastructures, like france, not a 3rd world country. Since one isn't locked into a year's contract and cancellation of the service may be made at the end of any month. I have tested broadvoice on an adsl2+ setup that has a static ip, 20 meg/800 kbps, gigabit internet connexion. It ran with both vonage and my isp's voip service all in use, too. No problems. I've also made some preliminary tests with adsl using ppoa, 4 meg/320k and a dynamic ip and the performance was the same. -er member for 20.9 years, 2146 visits, last login: 11.5 years ago lodged 18.8 years ago
Decided to test BroadVoice to see if I could use them and replace my Vonage service. I signed up on the web and was sent a VOIP phone adapter via FedEx 2nd day. They sent me a mini Supra box that does not allow me to place the adapter between my cable modem and router like most of the other adapters I’ve tested. I don’t know if this is going to cause any problems when there is a lot of data traffic on my network or not. I’m going to need to crank up a big bit torrent download and make a few calls to see what happens. I testing incoming and outgoing calls and thought I was all ready to go. I got a call on my cell phone from a friend that told me when he called my number he got about 10 seconds of dead silence and then a fast passed busy signal. I call my number from my cell phone and got the same error. Knowing they had 7/24 support- I called 611 from my phone and got the voice mail of the support department. I feel that I should be given the opportunity to hold if I want, and with my service not receiving calls, how are they going to call me back? I left a message. I checked before bed and it was back up and working. I really think I should have received a call from them asking me if my problem was repaired- but I never received any response form them. I had very bad first impression of their support and their reliability. I sent them a question about one of their features (the integration of their service and MS instant messenger client) and have yet to hear back from them (Its been 2 days). I just made a call to my home from work and the call was dropped. I am beginning to think this service might not be ready for prime time yet. I will continue to use for 2 more weeks and report on how things go before I get too close the to return date. 12/4/04 Update- Well I lost my incoming service for about 2 hours yesterday (12/3/04) about 5:00 PM CT and was able to verify with others on this Forum they were down also. I called their support and got a message saying my call could not be taken at this time and to call back some other time. I was not given the option to even leave a voice mail. Not good at all! I have made 3 calls on Saturday- and all 3 calls dropped sometime during the call and I had to call back. Really starting to qustion the reliability.... 6/3/05 BOY- The outage for 2 weeks was enough for me to give up! Even after service was resotred- call quality is bad. These guys may have the deal on international calling, but its not worth it. I'm moving over to voicepulse to see how they are! member for 20.5 years, 675 visits, last login: 7.4 years ago updated 18.8 years ago
I ordered BroadVoice on March 15. Got the BYOD configuration and entered it into my Grandstream 486 ATA. Was up and running in minutes. Sound quality was great...better than my Lingo line. I contacted Tech Support twice about non-essential things via email and received an email response within a day or two. In my continuing search for Caller ID with NAME, several on the forum mentioned that BroadVoice offered it. So, I gave them a try. Was very pleased with the depth of the CNAM. Instead of giving the number twice on wireless calls, it gave the city and number. Nice touch. Unfortunately, I cancelled BV yesterday because of its recent problems. At this time, they would not pass the ultimate "wife test". Once their problems are resolved I will have to give them another try. member for 19.8 years, 564 visits, last login: 13.8 years ago lodged 18.9 years ago
5/10/05 update: after near a week's outage, (no incoming for almost a week but 2nd day outgoing was back on) i found out the call quality is still great in americas, but some asia countries went down a lot. it just won't go thru or quality is bad. tech support is fast still. hope they can fix international problems. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------- i have my own device to activate, so they waive almost every fee for beginning. just after i finished register for a phone number, they sent me activation email in seconds (that's very fast). after i follow steps they want me to do, like 3 steps for my phone adapter to done. but it got locked after i activated this service. after calling them, my ATA got unlocked! i put 2 different phone service and numbers back in this sipura 2100 ATA and i can use one of them or been reached from 2 seperate lines~ they (broadvoice) give me almost everything i need for the calling features online. so i am happy for the buck of money so far. member for 19.2 years, 9 visits, last login: 18.8 years ago updated 18.9 years ago
Broadvoice has been somewhat consistent of as late, and during this first two weeks of May 2005 has been useless. I originally signed up back in December after switching from Vonage (happy customer, but wanted Europe calls included). I live in Switzerland and I had problems from the beginning with calls, very few calls were clear and error free. In April, I switched to the new NYC proxy server and started using 726-32 codec and started having much better success with calls and quality. As I am a techy, I like playing around with the proxies and the settings, e.g., modifying my dialling plan, etc., but I have a friend that signed up with me back in December and she is having problems because customer support is never there. I have ended up supporting her here and having to change proxies all the time is a trouble. I am hesistant to leave because I could not take my number with me to another provider, and I am somewhat hopeful that broadvoice will turn around at the last minute. They have promised a London-based server (since Dec 2004), but never delivered, and I am hoping that they do not have another huge crash again. If you are looking for a consistent service, don't with BV right now. I'm living abroad and I don't need a phone for daily use. I accept that the service will go down, and from my perspective it's cheaper for me than anything in Switzerland, but for those that are living in the States I would not bother right now with BV. Vonage is a very consistent provider. I have also tried Lingo for about 14 days whilst here, and the quality is bad bad bad. The call sounded like a tin can thanks to their one-stop shop of codecs, which I believe is the 729a flavour. Cheers member for 18.9 years, 4 visits, last login: 18.7 years ago lodged 18.9 years ago
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