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Review by rabrabrab 
Posted: 236 days ago
member for 2 years, 26 visits, last login: 183 days ago
 Palo Alto,Santa Clara,CA
 $80 per month (12 month contract)
 "inexpensive"
 "service is terrible - they use covad who are using ATT lines, everyone points finger at everyone else, I'm in the middle"
 "I'm finding another provider"
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I had a solid 1Mb DSL connection. Earthlink offered me a deal for $20 more a month - 6Mb and phone service. I've been without phone for a week - twice. My phone randomly doesn't work. Covad says ATT has a bad wire to my house, ATT says there's bad inside wiring, Earthlink does nothing. I'm also supposed to have 6Mb but actually they can't deliver better than 1.5Mb because of the distance to the switch. However, my modem frequently reports the connection it has it is at around 900kb to 1Mb and the speed tests I do indicate that my speeds are around 650kb. Occasionally I'll see it configured at 1500kb (1.5Mb) as it's supposed to be, and then the speed tests come in at 1.1 to 1.2 Mb. I've spent so many DAYS worth of time on the phone trying to get decent service I can't count them. Mindspring (who I signed up with 11 years ago) was great. Earthlink is sinking into the swamp.
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Review by lab16
Posted: 1.3 years ago
member for 3.9 years, 45 visits, last login: 84 days ago
Albuquerque,Bernalillo,NM
$22 per month (12 month contract)
 about 25 days
"Nothing"
"The worst tech support I have ever seen."
"canceled as soon as I had realized what a mistake it was"
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When I was receiving technical support on trying to get my service operational, the person with whom I was speaking with all but called me a liar, saying that the device that they had given me had no password, when in fact it did. She constantly asked me the same question over and over. She asked me what adapter model I had literally over 10 times in one conversation. I was put on hold, sometimes up to 30 minutes at a time, several times. She told me that I had to be 'mistaken' on my model number of my adapter. I felt like I was talking to a computer because she just randomly asked for information that was of no use to her and then immediately forgot it. I never got the service working, and after wasting a couple of hours of time with support, I just gave up and canceled.
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 Review by TransitMan
UPDATED: 1.9 years ago
member for 9.2 years, 4309 visits, last login: a few hours ago
Dayton,Montgomery,OH
$20 per month (12 month contract)
about 30 days
"NONE"
"Poor customer service, poor billing service, Outsourced Tech Support"
"Stay very far away from this product. Be afraid, very afraid."
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Final update:
Late July, my house phone and cable lines were subjected to a lightning strike/surge which took out several routers, a computer, DSL modem, cable modem and the ATA for ELK TrueVoice.
Contacted ELK for a replacement, and after jumping through numerous hoops, got one shipped to me and sent the smoked one back.
Within 5 days of placing the replacement in service, it literally cooked itself to death. I was having trouble keeping a dial tone, friends would get a hold of me via email or cell phone and tell me that they could not get through on the phone number I had given them.
Upon inspecting the ATA, it was so hot to the touch that for a moment I thought I had touched a hot boiling pot.
Contacted ELK for a replacement and got so many runarounds that they never replaced the ATA and left me hanging without VoIP service.
I then contacted TWC and got their Digital Voice service.
ELK has since cleared my account to a zero balance after I snail mailed all my documentation to show where and when I tried to get my issues resolved.
If you need VoIP, DO NOT get ELK TrueVoice.
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I've had ELK True Voice for about 5 months, and when it works, it works good.
No real issues with calling anyone, including long distance. There were some minor issues of dropped calls, but it turned out to be my phone equipment and not True Voice.
Billing was a nightmare in the beginning.
Got charged a one-time setup fee (was not informed of this until the charge appeared).
Then was charged for Overnight shipping on the Linksys Sipura SPA2100. (Was not told this would happen, and was only aware of it after ELK charged my account. They claimed I request the unit to be sent this way. Never in my initial conversation with ELK did this come up, nor was i made aware of having to use the Linksys. The initial conversation has left a lot to be desired. Seems ELK was jumping back into the VOIP fray after selling their original customers to Vonage!)
Raised a lot of issues with customer service, including conversations with the person who originally took my order, which thankfully I did document. Was finally granted 2 months free, and even though I was promised a refund of the shipping charge, it has yet to happen.
At the end of my term, i will be looking long and hard at either staying with ELK True Voice or switching.
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Review by calathea
UPDATED: 2.7 years ago
member for 7.9 years, 1394 visits, last login: 5 days ago
Corvallis,Benton,OR
$25 per month
about 12 days
"Makes Qwest look better"
"Installation was a nightmare and sound quality was unsatisfactory"
"Went back to a telephone line"
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*****************update 15 Mar 2007*************************************
It finally got set up and working. But people would complain about the sound quality of the conversations. To some places, it was fine (Alaska). To Arizona it was not. Sometimes my husband would tweak the settings for certain calls and get better sound quality. But finally, he got tired of the complaints, canceled the Earthlink, and ordered a Qwest land line.
It's hard to find anything positive about the whole experience. Too bad, because VOIP is a really good idea. I suggested he try the Comcast version, but he was too burned out by the whole thing. Oh -- that's the positive thing. In order to try to improve the sound quality, he upgraded our Comcast bandwidth -- getting much snappier downloads now . . .
Update 18 October 2006
The dial tone finally came -- tech support redeemed itself a few points by helping with a sound quality issue -- If all goes well in the future I'll update again, but gosh, that was an AWFUL installation experience.
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My husband signed up for Earthlink TrueVoice. He wanted VOIP and had good past experiences with Earthlink. But right off the bat, Earthlink has a business process issue to iron out. They sent an activation email before the line was provisioned. Suggestion for Earthlink: Wait until the line is activated -- THEN notify your customers.
1. Earthlink emailed last Friday saying the the phone lines would be ready today, October 16. "writing to let you know that your service will be activated on 10/16/06"
2. When my husband called support at 8:00 am this morning after following the setup instructions with no joy, they had him do all kinds of configuration changes, cycle power, etc. etc. I worked on it for a couple of hours before going into the office, looking at the VOIP forum in DSL reports. There we learned what the actual IP address of the Spa-2100 is: 192.168.1.1. The Sipura documentation says it is 192.168.0.1, but, well, it's just not. We got the network going fine if we put the Sipura next to the modem and the firewall after that (another tip from dslreports). But no dial tone.
3. After I went to work hubby kept trying, and finally at around 4:00 pm Earthlink told him to wait another 24 hours 'in case perhaps' the line wasn't provisioned yet.
4. This evening around 7 pm, I called support yet again, mostly because it was tiring listening to all of the complaints about EarthLink.
5. Tier 1 support directed me to the wrong IP address for the Spa2100. The documentation says its IP address is 192.168.0.1. The tech kept telling me to enter that into the browser, which took me to our Netgear router. The IP address of the Spa2100 unit is 192.168.1.1. The tech just couldn't believe that 192.168.0.1 didn't take me to the Spa.
Once we did start looking at the spa configuration pages, the picture in front of the tech did not match the screen in front of me. He kept asking me to look for "Regional" and for negative numbers, none of which appeared anywhere on the Linksys Phone Adapter Configuration page, basic or advanced, on ANY tab. I suggested we use netmeeting, at which point he bumped me to Tier 2 (about a 10-minute wait)
6. Tier 2 was still India. He determined that the line was not yet provisioned. He promised to pass me to a Tier 3 technical genius who would be able to fix the problem immediately. Wait time for Tier 3 was half an hour.
7. Tier 3 guy verified that the line wasn't provisioned, speculated that the reason was the Telco not letting go of the number. Said it should have been done for sure at 8 pm, but it wasn't, so now it should be done by midnight. He said he couldn't do anything about the line, or answer my questions about the IP address, because he is "not a technical guy."
At least we finally got a reason why there's no dial tone --the line's not set up. Would have been nice to know that at 8:00 AM rather than 8:30PM, so we would have not wasted a whole day fooling with it.
We are not yet happy VOIP campers. Yet, ever optimistic, we hope that the phone will eventually start working.
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Earthlink TrueVoice
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EarthLink True voice is terrible