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Review by wizardgmb0 See Profile

  • Location: Richmond, Henrico, VA, USA
  • Cost: $25 per month (month by month)
price, easy setup, good E911, services areas many others don't
reliability & repeatability - regular outages & random changes of configuation
lousy service, not worth the aggrevagation!
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

My partner and I make relatively few calls and the monthly Verzion bill and their attendant array of customer service problems had become annoying. We relocated over 500 miles but couldn't lose Verizon as LEC so I decided to switch to VOIP. A check of VOIP providers for Richmond VA revealed a very limited number of choices that didn't require us to have DSL to get service. Since I would eventually like to set up an Asterisk switch, Vonage was out and Viatalk seemed to have the best buzz of the remaining three.

Online signup was quite easy and painless although I was concerned that my credit card might not work because it was still associated with my former address. That worry was unfounded as the transaction went though without a hitch. The adapter arrived in less than a week and I was running within minutes of delivery. My tests were satisfactory and I proclaimed to my partner that we now had telephone service.

The next day she tried to place a call but it as soon as the party answered the call disconnected. This was repeated exactly once before I got yelled at. I made several tests and discovered that the problem was only on outgoing calls and occured 100% of the time. I opened a trouble ticket online at 10PM and went to bed. The next morning I had a snappy little reply from tech support "Cycle the power to the adapter and that will fix the problem". The stock answer reply, that I had already tried, didn't annoy me nearly as much as the technician closing the ticket without my having reported a reolution. I then spent the better part of an hour with level 1&2 tech support. It turned out that someone had tweaked the wrong setting so I, along with a host of other customers, lost outgoing capabilities.

Since that time, service and call quality have been generally good with an equal mix of local & long distance calls. I make a daily 40+ min call to record from a voice mail system and so far that has been uneventful. We have had a couple of instances of short periods where one party couldn't hear the other in the middle of a call. What does annoy me are the things that aren't repeatable or pop up & vanish before I can open a ticket:

- 2x out of 12x hook flashing disconnected calls rather than switching to waiting calls

- delayed dialtone (Viatalk says this is an ISP or LAN problem, another stock answer)

- intercepts after properly & repeatedly dialed calls

- calls with deskset speed dial #'s don't work but manual dialing same #'s does work

- today, dialing *67 (caller ID block) prevents a call from being completed, last night it worked fine

My impression is that the systems people are constantly tweaking Viatalk's Asterisk systems with out regard for the ancillary problems they may create. When enough people complain, the ancillary problems are corrected. Some of my problems may be attributable to having a four year old router that lacks QOS but nobody has been able to convince me that QOS makes a significant improvement in typical residential service.

With the exception of closing my first trouble ticket with a curt reply, tech support has been very good. For the most part, connection quality has been as good as or better than Verizon POTS. Consistency of operation and reliability are the only things I can't give Viatalk high marks on. However, if you ignore the little problems that crop up for few hours, odds are pretty good they will be resolved by a call from someone more obsessive compulsive or with more free time to call tech support.

All in all, for $14.95 a month and not having to deal with Verizon, the service is worth it!

______________________________________________________________________

11/27/05

My positive comments were a bit premature. We have been without service for most of the last 18 hours. Apparently ViaTalk has had some sort of meltdown because someone responded to my online trouble ticket stating that they were aware of the problem and it affects many customers. This is the fourth outage in the last month that we know about but we don't use the phone enough to be surre about the full breadth of the problem

It has been talking longer and longer for calls to complete and the pesky "error 40?" message has become more prevelant. If you are like me, having to look at a written number twice while dialing, you are almost guaranteed to hear the "error 40?" message and having to redial.

ViaTalk bills itself as being in beta test but this seems more like alpha testing to me. If they are this far behind the eight ball in turning this into a production service, then they shouldn't be charging prices comparable to those of companies that have their act together.

My ratings for ViaTalk have been revised downward in a big way. Anyone looking for RELIABLE VOIP service should pass ViaTalk by in favor of a service that doesn't bill itself as "in beta testing". I'll be turning on a different service later this week.

G.



member for 18.4 years, 3 visits, last login: 16 years ago
updated 18.3 years ago


Review by grimzap See Profile

  • Location: Medina, Medina, OH, USA
  • Cost: $23 per month (month by month)
  • Install: about 3 days
Low entry cost.
Poor quality on most calls. Support practically non-existent. Low price only with long contract.
You get what you pay for.
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

I wanted to like ViaTalk a lot but over time the service has revealed its flaws. Initial setup kit had no instructions inside at all. Did come with free phone adapter. I got instructions off of their website which is pretty well organized. Occasionally, either received voice or my voice going out becomes choppy and can't be understood. People complain of getting "all circuits busy" interrupts. This is mostly a few states away. You must always dial a 1, even for what used to be local calls--this is merely an annoyance. But the worst problem is that one of my family members in a western state can never call me on the ViaTalk phone line. It always gives a rapid busy signal or an "all circuits busy" interrupt. They can call my cell phone or my work phone (regular land line) just fine at any time, but if they call my ViaTalk line it NEVER works for them. Funny thing is they came back to my home for a visit and it then worked fine from thier phone. I've been sending emails back and forth on this for weeks with no successful resolution. This may be the thing that sinks the service for me. Too bad because I love the concept. I just need something more reliable.

(Update) ViaTalk support has not helped at all with the call in problem. After 2 days they have told me to call Verizon to take care of it. I don't see how this could be a Verizon problem as every other call made from the phone is fine except calls to my ViaTalk phone. Wouldn't this seem to point to a problem at ViaTalk or at least a problem with Verizon's support of ViaTalk in the transition to the Internet? Anyway, I'll have to spend some more time to see if I can resolve this myself. The dialing 1 before numbers is necessary in my area as even with land lines here, we must dial all 10 numbers. These are not long distance calls, it has to do with the number of area codes we have here. On my old land line, we did not have to dial the 1, with ViaTalk, we do. I don't consider it a big issue... just one people with my situation should know about.

(Update 2) I worked with user phone support (after over a half-hour wait) on the call quality issues. They suggested setting up port forwarding on the router. I'd think this would be a problem if I had a lot of bandwidth on my local network (my side of the router) which I typically don't. I have the quality problems regardless if my computer is on or off. Anyway, I went ahead and did the forwarding and it made no difference. I'd estimate some kind of quality/reliability issue on 50% of all calls. They range from not being able to dial out at all (intercept says "101" then goes to repeating dial tone), one side of the call not being able to hear the other, voice "bubbles" like an intermittent connection, and voice faintness. Other people also complain that they can't get a connection to my phone without any explanation at all. I put in a support ticket on these issues on Oct 7th. Today is the 10th and I've had no response at all (ticket #MUQ-62004).

I'm going to try another carrier. Maybe this is just a factor with VOIP? Are we on the bleeding edge here? Must say I'm underwhelmed at this point and hope to get improved service with another carrier. Phones are one of those things that should just work.

(Update 3) Man, I must be a pillar of patience. Spent more hours last week working on the quality issues. ViaTalk immediately suspected my ISP. We tried some ping testing and tracerouts with some intermittent failures. Pinging things like yahoo and google gave consistently better pings than the ViaTalk switch yet their support could offer no suggestions for improvement. I called my ISP but, naturally, they would not lift a finger either. My sevice with them has been perfect fo 5 years... why would they want to take the blame? This seems to be a big problem with VOIP... no one will take the support ball and run with it. Customers are left to do the main legwork of troubleshooting. I'd expect we'd at least get on a 3-way call with my ISP and see if there could be some actual troubleshooting of the network issues. Very large ping times can be observed from may machine and while I was talking to ViaTalk support, my phone cutout several times and they could not hear me. You'd think that while the problem was happening there could be some kind of troubleshooting that would pinpoint the problem. So ViaTalk suggested we replace my Linksys box. Result? No service at all for 4 days. It seems that when ViaTalk ships out a new box, they automatically change the connection parameters so that the old one doesn't work any more. They didn't inform me of this and I spent another few hours of my Saturday working with their support people who knew a new box had been sent out but didn't offer reprogramming the old box as a solution. I only found out about the box issue because I put in a ticket on the website. This is a BIG problem. I hate to go back to my land line.... I really HATE to. But this is worse and my family is in open rebellion. They want their phone just to work and I can't blame them. I find it interesting also that no one has offered any kind of refund for weeks of partial or non-existent service.

Oh, one more thing you should consider with VOIP. It is not all that easy to change providers. If you want to keep the same number, you must keep your old VOIP account open while your new one performs the transfer (3-4 weeks) which means you'll be paying for 2 services at the same time.

(Update 4 - The Final Update)

Well, had to eat crow and call up Verizon. I thought the service couldn't be worse but it was. Now it is taking forever to get my old number back. Can't see why this is such an issue but it has cost me an extra month of service with Viatalk that I'll only partially use. My conclusion? I don't think VOIP is supportable right now. With all the exquipment and different companies between you and who you are trying to call, NO ONE will accept responsibility for poor quality. The only way this is going to work is if someone (I think it should be the VOIP carrier) will get your ISP online with you at the same time and troubleshoot the issue. ViaTalk heard my problem... I was talking to them explaining the problem and they could hear it cut out and become spotty. Their solution was for me to talk to my ISP. Well, my connection works fine for every other application I use. Only the VOIP has a problem. I blame the overall internet for some of the issues but the lack of support falls squarely on the shoulders of ViaTalk. They need to take responsibility for poor service and if they can't, they should recommend a move back to POTs at their expense. They advertise good service and they just can't deliver.

member for 18.5 years, 6 visits, last login: 18.4 years ago
updated 18.4 years ago


VTBrendan
Viatalk
Premium Member
join:2005-06-27
Clifton Park, NY

1 edit

VTBrendan

Premium Member

response

Hi,

I apologize for any issues you may have encountered. Your adapter should have came with the only instructions you needed right inside the box, printed by linksys themselves. Because we preprovision your box all you have to do is plug it in to get it up and running.

As for dialing a 1 before dialing numbers, this is not necessary on local calls at all. 7 digit local dialing has been a standard feature since day 1.

Our phone tech support hours are currently m-f from 9am to 12am EST, and will be expanding to 24/7 at the end of the month. Please make sure you are calling during this time as you should be able to get through without trouble.

Unless it is ISP/connection related, if you give us a call we will be able to work with you to resolve any call quality and reliability issues you are experiencing.

-Brendan
grimzap
join:2005-08-29

grimzap

Member

Re: response

Hi,

Well it is only fair to explain that the main problem I was having turned out to be user error. My daughter had captured our temporary number before our regular number was ported to our ViaTalk service. She continued to use the old number and that is what caused the problem.
I'm still experiencing a lot of operability issues. These are: a circuits busy signal when someone tries to call from outside, the person I'm talking to not being able to hear me while I can hear them, a "bubbling" quality to the voice heard both listening and talking, not being able to get a dial tone. In addition, 7-digit dialing works some of the time but not all--note I live in a region in which land lines require 10-digit dialing at all times so that may be a factor. All of these problems occur at various, unpredictable times. I just got off the phone with support (about a 25min wait) and they are going to have me try something on my router to fix the issues. I hope it is a fix as the rest of my family is getting pretty tired of having a partially-functioning phone.

Cyrus255
join:2006-01-20
Plano, TX

Cyrus255

Member

Interesting complication...

So knowing what you do now, would you consider giving them a different rating?

I'm curious.

I think it's safe to say most VoIP services have had rough spots in this emerging industry.

Review by stevech1 See Profile

  • Location: San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Cost Contract price not specified.
pricing on par with competitors; says E911 works
ViaTalk says they are STILL in beta and debugging - but their pricing is same as from mature providers'
Pay a few more percent for Vonage's maturity or wait 6 - NO, 12 months on ViaTalk
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

My ISP: RoadRunner Cable 4.8Mbps/350Kbps consistently. High QoS score each time I measured.

The Good

- Call quality good in 9 of 10 calls on average. Those that were bad were bad throughout the entire call duration, as if something in the protocols made an incorrect initial estimate. On my end, no other bandwidth consuming software running.

- One-on-one via email to tech support rather than via trouble tickets - responsive but doesn't appear that ViaTalk has enough VoIP system engineers versus generic IT guys from a web hosting service.

The Bad (Why I terminated service after 3 months)

Quality: Too inconsistent to be acceptable to the entire family as a POTS replacement - even when we try adjust expectations downward due to lower cost

- touch-tone access to many voice mail systems and voice-response systems like pharmacys is unreliable or never works. I and many others showed ViaTalk many cases where DTMF does not work, and that the tones sound bad on the far end of the call. They can merely call their POTS line and listen to crummy sounding DTMFs from their subscribers. Company denies there's a systemic problem despite multiple complaints.

- Reliability: their servers were down or misconfigured such that service is unusable too often. One time, they programmed their servers to hijack the "#" key on everyone's phone, for one+ day, to use for their own voice mail - not realizing that this key is often used by IVRs that we subscribers call. How naieve.

- Server updates on their seemed to require me to power-cycle the ATA so it will re-register. Unacceptable - need user-transparency.

- CallerID with Name, long-standing missing feature

- Tech Support response-time to trouble tickets - 1+ days. Website advertising claims on tech support access 24/7 via phone/web is misleading and/or untrue.

- Outward call attempts that failed for simple reasons (all circuits busy, number is busy) yielded cryptic spoken error codes "one o one" instead of busy, fast-busy tones. Absurd.

- ATAs: The Sipura ATA was inferior in DTMF issues to the PAP2 which I guess Linksys discontinued. No other ATAs offered

- Their servers may not be Carrier-grade, e.g., may be public domain Asterisk - in which case they may never get the stability the users expect.

- Billing: They billed me for future service a week after I terminated service. Simple but inexcusable error: formal ticket to discontinue service was accepted by ViaTalk. They disabled the ATA and phone # but no one "told" the billing system. No argument on correcting the error. Thus, I returned the two ATAs via registered mail ($$$) just to be sure.

member for 19.2 years, 448 visits, last login: 17.5 years ago
lodged 18.4 years ago


Review by R Campbell See Profile

  • Location: Middletown, Dauphin, PA, USA
  • Cost: $10 per month (24 month contract)
  • Install: about 7 days
I found call quality to be excellent
Reliability is aweful
Not worth the trouble
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

I have been three weeks without service. While support has been polite they have seem to have no idea how to resolve the problem. Contacting support is a gamble, sometimes you wait only a few minutes but today they are totally unavailable.

The main source of the problem is Viatalk’s server blocks my IP address. Viatalk has had problems with fraud of some nature and in response they restrict the IP addresses that you can connect from. It seems that my IP address is not on the list of approved and we are now waiting several days to get our service restored. As you can imagine this has been a major headache especially as I foolishly signed up for a two year contract that has been paid in full already ($240).

I still hope that Viatalk can resolve these issues but my hopes are fading and I may have to consign $240 to a very bad experience.

member for 18.4 years, driveby review (so far)
lodged 18.4 years ago


Review by dbugmaster See Profile

  • Location: Hopewell, Hopewell City, VA, USA
  • Cost: $23 per month (month by month)
  • Install: about 4 days
Great call quality and quick to send welcome kit out to me.
Very low uptime, unable to reach server most of the time, customer support unresponsive.
I wouldn't go with them again, login server goes down regularly.
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

I joined about 3 weeks ago, everything was alright at first, until I noticed the caller ID on my direct tv told me there was an incoming call every few minutes. I sent them a trouble ticket (took 2 or 3 days to respond) and they told me it was the voicemail notification, even though I told them that I didn't have any voicemail and it never did it on my other service, responded to them, they never got back to me and closed the ticket. One day I tried to make some phone calls, and the call would drop after 2 or 3 seconds after the person answers, issued another trouble ticket, took 2 days to repond, but it stopped before they responded to it. Now, I have an issue where their login server goes down very often, and for hours at a time. I issued a trouble ticket for this, and I'm sure it won't get fixed or anyone will respond to it. Their customer service only responds with scripted responses, which troubles me that they hire people with little know how about how things work. They get a question, and answer with what they think matches the most. The call quality is excellent when a call can be made. I guess their just a new company and can't handle the volume. I will be switching to a new company, too bad, they made it sound like it's so great.

member for 20 years, 29 visits, last login: 15.1 years ago
lodged 18.6 years ago