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Review by gunsmoke 
member for 3 years, 10 visits, last login: 2.9 years ago
lodged 3 years ago
 Flower Mound,Denton,TX
 $15 per month- (12 month contract)
 "Cheap" "Inconsistent call quality, advertised features don't work, billing issues and poor technical support..." "Worst VOIP experience I've ever had. I know usually you get what you pay for, but not with VOIPo."
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I've had VOIPo for over 6 months.
When I first signed up for VOIPo, they sent me an old and used Linksys router. It was large, and looked damaged, as though it had been burned. Either someone put their cigarettes out on it, or a bird lived directly above it and they didn't bother cleaning it up before they sent it to me. It took a long time to get that resolved, but eventually I was sent a newer Linksys device.
After setting it up and configuring, I noticed the quality was much lower than my previous voip service. Try to make a call and you will only be successful about 50% of the time, and then the quality is okay. Sometimes there is no dial tone at all. Sometimes you will dial and won't hear anything. Sometimes you'll get through but the quality and noise will be so bad you'll need to call back. Sometimes when people call, you will hear nothing. Calls frequently drop right in the middle of a conversation. When you are on the phone and you are getting another call, Call Waiting ID does not appear at all and you have no idea who is calling.
Sure, I've had the occasional issue with calls with other voip providers, but nothing like this. Call Waiting ID has always worked before, and this is the first time it hasn't.
I tried to figure this out by contacting tech support, and they have never once tried to help on their end. They have given me conflicting port forwarding settings, having me set to one range, then telling me they made a mistake and to change it to another range. Everyone makes mistakes, so no big deal, but then when they don't know what to say they blame the router. I do everything they ask and it's still not working so they blame the phones, and it doesn't even matter what phone I have, they will blame it. They just want you to name a phone so they can tell you their service isn't compatible with whatever phone you name. They've even asked me to completely disable my router's firewall! (Which I did for a quick test, but that wasn't the problem.)
Since I have the same ISP, router and phones I had with my last voip provider, it must be VOIPo, and their tech support won't help. After I told them we've never had an issue before, they just sent me a message telling me the following:
"Please keep in mind that all VoIP providers design their own systems so comparing one to another is not useful since none use the same systems. We've reached the end of our troubleshooting options as this time. Unfortunately VOIPo may not be compatible with your phone or router."
That's it. Not even a single attempt to look into the issue on their side.
Another issue is billing. I make occasional international calls, which you will need to pay extra for and have a credit card on file. One day we received an email apologizing for being over-billed. Not a big deal because it was only about $6, but another day I receive an email telling me my account is going to be suspended! I logged in to my account and discovered that they were having a problem charging less than $1 to my credit card. That's right, they were going to suspend my account, for less than $1.
If you are a masochist, who enjoys being blamed for everything that goes wrong followed by "have a great day!" then you might enjoy dealing with VOIPo tech support. If you want a good quality voip provider that works, I would suggest looking elsewhere, which is what I will be doing.
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Review by tdoris
member for 12.4 years, 919 visits, last login: 22 days ago
lodged 3.1 years ago
- Downers Grove,Dupage,IL
- $12 per month
- (12 month contract)
 about 7 days- "Price"
- "Voice Quality, Tech Support"
- "Poor voice quality and dropped calls. Tech support unable to resolve."
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Ordered the "Residential Freedom" package for $135 a year. They provided a Linksys RT31P2.
The install process was painless, but shortly after problems started. I had periodic echo issues and sometimes the call would disconnect after a few minutes. These are problems I never consistently had with any other VOIP provider. I filed several tickets and tech support was fairly quick to respond, but they never had any solution that worked for more than a week or so.
The final straw was an announcement (via e-mail) that they would charge $25 for a reprogramming fee if my device lost its configuration for any reason. Considering the reprogramming is as simple as entering a URL into the profile field on a configuration page, I consider $25 to be a ridiculous amount to charge.
I'm now looking for a new VOIP provider.
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Review by (hidden by request)
(review was emailed from domain earthlink.net)
lodged 3.1 years ago
- Cary,Wake,NC
- $18 per month
- (month by month)
- about 10 days
- "Cheap. Easy install."
- "Poor voice quality. Disinterested support."
- "Not ready for prime time."
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Like they say, "Your results may vary.", and mine sure did. Bottom line, the voice quality was much worse than Vonage and I could not get tech support interested in fixing the dial delay problem so I cancelled.
I've had Vonage since early '05 and have been very satisfied with the service. Last year I ran across an ad for ooma and while looking at that as a possibility for my sister, I saw the reviews here of VOIPo. Since VOIPo would cost me half of Vonage and the reviews were uniformly positive I decided to give it the old "30 day trial".
It took the ATA 10 days to get here so that cut the "30 days" down to "20 days". But the install was super easy since it was the same H/W as Vonage (Linksys RT31P2). I didn't even have to swap the power supply! I had a dial tone within 30 seconds and calls in and out worked fine but it was clear from the start that the voice quality was lower than Vonage.
By forwarding my Vonage number to the VOIPo number and using custom caller ID, I was able to completely disconnect the Vonage ATA and use VOIPo exclusively totally transparent to the rest of the world. (Tech note: If you want to do this, be sure to enter the old number in Dashboard BEFORE you disconnect the ATA because VOIPo has to call the old number for validation.)
Things went OK for the first few days but then incoming voice started breaking up and some calls were being dropped entirely. Support changed an option but that did not fix it, so 2 days later they had me setup the recommended port forwarding. This fixed the breaking up and dropping but the incoming voice was sounded "gravelly".
Then a few days later we started having a 15 to 20 second delay between dial and ring (Vonage is about 3 or 4). I called support twice and finally was told to "live with it".
So I decided that I had put enough time & effort into trying to save $15 a month and cancelled.
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Review by jondavisct
member for 3.6 years, 3 visits, last login: 3.4 years ago
lodged 3.6 years ago
- New Britain,Hartford,CT
- $13 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Free 2nd line. Commitment to a quality product. VoipoTim"
- "Cannot get latest line up and running reliably"
- "Could be a good product. Just needs more tech support people."
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This is my 3rd Voipo line that I am installing. In addition to Voipo, I also have 3 ViaTalk lines and one Teleblend (leftover from Sunrocket crash) line.
I really want to like Voipo. I really do. However, this last line has been such a hassle. I bought this one line with the idea to get it setup at a new property and then add 2 more lines to it.
I setup the system with all the appropriate equipment and configured firewalls with DMZ etc. However, it did not work. I then ripped out all the equipment and plugged the voipo box (rt31p2) directly into the cable modem. This time I got the lights and I thought I was good to go. Alas, I can make outgoing calls but incoming callers cannot hear me. That is odd, that is the problem we see when we have a firewall incorrectly configured - But I don't have a firewall.
Then, back and forth via a trouble ticket with Voipo for 8 DAYS. Finally thinking it is working (based on 2 test calls) and then the next day, it is down again.
I am finally on the telephone with the Voipo people to get this resolved while I wait. It is too bad we have to do this but maybe we can get it up and running. I will post when we get this resolved.
The wife is even now wanting me to put in AT&T. She is not as patient as I am.
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Review by jlyskowinski
member for 3.8 years, 3 visits, last login: 2.7 years ago
updated 3.8 years ago
- Lanesville,Harrison,IN
- $18 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Nothing"
- "I don't know where to begin"
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Back around mid June 2009, I ordered the VOIPo phone service from VOIPo (www.voipo.com) and a few days later received the adapter, I set everything up, however, I do not own a router and was not aware that I would need one, this is not listed anywhere that is visible to a potential customer on the site unless you visit their knowledge base, but who really ever does that???? Anyway, the adapter that I had worked fine, was able to make calls, etc, however, it was like using dialup, I could use the computer, but not the phone and vice versa. After speaking to the sales department, they told me that I was out of luck and I would have to send the device back, because in order for it work correctly I would need a router. Then I called and spoke to a new employee, I believe his name was Daniel, not sure though. He told me that Voipo was in the process of ordering new devices that were a combo adapter/router and it would take at least three weeks before they were received. They told me that they would have to test them before sending them out to make sure that they worked with their systems. I also spoke to their support team via online chat about this as well. So the wait begins.....
I received the new adapter/router on Friday July 17th, 2009. I hooked everything up, however, Voipo had not registered the device on their end, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt and went through the process of registering everything, porting, provisioning, etc (whatever all of that means exactly). After much doing of this over several days, I still could not receive incoming calls, I could only make outbound calls. After much going over and over with this several times on 7/17 and Monday 7/20. The issue was still not resolved. After spending most of Monday 7/17 going over the motions again of my device continuing stating that it was not registered with VOIPo servers, off and on throughout the day, I became fed up and threatened to cancel the service by 6pm EST Monday July 20th if the service was not fully functioning. The staff I guess doesn't believe in customer retention or has never heard of it, as they kept encouraging me to cancel the service, WHAT COMPANY WANTS TO LOSE A PAYING CUSTOMER WHEN WE ARE THEIR PAYCHECK??????? Anyway, after support rep Justin said that he would help me he proceeded to do so and then when I had to reboot the device my internet, naturally was shut off for a few minutes, I went back online and then my computer locked up so I rebooted, once I was back online Justin asked for a new password to "look at my computer" using www.teamviewer.com. (this is a service for tech support to see what is happening with their product on your modem or computer). Anyway, I had already submitted a new password to him but he didn't see it, so I reset it up again, submitted the password to him via a support ticket as I had been doing this since Friday afternoon and he NEVER logged back in to teamviewer it was like he disappeared or went home for the night. A couple of other reps did this to me on Friday evening as we were trying to get the service established and working, since 6pm is their time to leave they left without making sure that everything was working properly, so basically I was left holding the bag until later that night when one of the reps or whoever it was assisted me after hours and couldn't find the user id and password to access my broadband modem. I was told that it would be escalated to a Tier II tech and taken care of first thing Monday morning and it was not, still at 8:00pm Monday evening July 20th the device was offline again and still not working. I decided to cancel as the rep had "left the building" once again. I have worked in customer service, sales and marketing since 1989 and I am almost 40 years old, you DO NOT treat a customer like this, it is very unethical and just not right period. You communicate with the customer and work with them not disappear on them twice in 72 hours.
Also, I was owed a refund as my billing account had been suspended, due to the new adapter arriving and the $18 initially paid when the account was purchased was to be applied to the July payment, however, the account was being paid via Paypal subscription and July's payment was taken out on Wednesday 7/15. The June payment was going to be applied for the July payment when I received the new device and the payment taken out on July 15 was NOT to be taken out, I was to start paying again on the account on 8/15. I called to let them know and also submitted a support ticket, never received a refund even though I was told several times by the sup5port staff that I would receive one. Once I canceled the service I wanted my refund as I had still not received it and was told by the owner Timothy Dick, that I could not receive a refund based on the cancellation terms, there were numerous tickets issued on the refund, but apparently he did not read all of the tickets and refused. Finally after much going back and forth a few times via support tickets he issued the refund making an "exception" because his employees told me wrong, which is not true, they suspended the billing account because I needed the router/adapter and had to wait on it to arrive in three weeks or so.
DO NOT do business with this company, as I have a feeling they were the ones taking the device off of the servers intentionally and then making excuses as it was my Verizon broadband and the Linksy's adapter, which to me is just a lame excuse. Also, any company that has employees that choose to leave because it is "time to go on a Friday evening-party time) or they just feel they can leave and ignore a paying customer who is their paycheck is not going to get ANY business from me period!
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Review by gtx260
member for 4 years, 3 visits, last login: 2.9 years ago
updated 3.9 years ago
- Miami,Miami-Dade,FL
- $16 per month
- about 14 days
- "Excellent Customer Service"
- "Unreliable Service, Horrible Call Quality, Always a new problem, Shoddy Packaging"
- "Don't be fooled by the smoke and mirrors VOIPO provides poor service"
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I recently switched from a previous VoIP provider where I was able to work things directly out of the box. I decided to try VOIPO from all the positive reviews on here.
My switch to VOIPO was terrible from the get go. My package took 2 weeks to arrive because "there were some problems with shipping!" When I finally got it and tried to set up I ran into some problems. It may have just been me, but It shouldn't be a hassle out of the box. I called tech support to help, and they were great.
I EVENTUALLY got it set up, but ran into intermittent problems with voice quality, dead air, and other parties having trouble hearing me. I called tech support multiple times, and my ticket would be open for days. They eventually said it was a problem with me since no one else was having problems, but if you look on their support forum everyone has problems!
Do not be fooled by the smoke and mirrors, and all the positive reviews on this site. VOIPO has great customer support, but why does one need to constantly contact customer support? Things should just work with ease as soon as you set things up.
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Review by mujibur
member for 9.9 years, 2 visits, last login: 3.1 years ago
updated 4 years ago
- Jacksonville,Duval,FL
- $11 per month
- (12 month contract)
- "Cheap"
- "No Fax support"
- "DO NOT sign up if you intend to Fax"
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I fax about 2-3 pages each month and have never had problems on Vonage. So before signing up for Voipo, I asked customer support whether I can fax on Voipo. Their response: While it's not a feature of Voipo, faxes can be sent.
So I signed up and tried several test faxes which went fine. I sent about 6 faxes successfully since signing up in Feb 2009. Then they had the Network issues that interrupted service for many customers. Well, whatever they did to fix the network issues, I now get echos on voice and CANNOT send a single FAX. The echos I can tolerate, but no fax is very inconvenient for me.
So I called tech support and was told that while it's not supported, if I open a ticket, someone can at least take a look to see if the settings on my device is optimized. This seemed reasonable to me. I send the ticket and here's the response:
> Hello,
> Since we do not fully support fax and we do not recommend that our customers to use our service for anything except voice service, there's no troubleshooting we can offer for your faxing issue. Faxing is pretty much hit or miss on VoIP service due to the communication over the internet and up time is never guaranteed. Let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Thank you.
So not only do they not support fax, they won't help you in any way to troubleshoot. And their recommendation to only use it for voice seems inconsistent with the information that I received before signing up. I guess it's not worth their time anymore to help out their customers. So anyone considering faxing on Voipo, don't repeat my mistake and go with another provider. I plan on changing as soon as the contract is up.
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 Review by fifty nine
member for 10.6 years, 2409 visits, last login: a few hours ago
updated 4.1 years ago
- Sussex,Sussex,NJ
- $18 per month
- about 7 days
- "Excellent customer support"
- "They're a DISCO company who doesn't like routers"
- "Great for people who aren't really tech savvy"
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Update 3/16/09: I sent them back their ATA, and after 3 weeks they hadn't refunded my account, so I contacted them. They said it wasn't checked in. I had to give them the tracking number for them to find the ATA. Unbelievable. Well, at least I got my account refunded.
Original review:
Disclaimer: I can't really give a full review of them since I never got them to work properly.
Got the service ordered at the end of January. Linksys PAP2T device arrived a week later. I had really no choice in the matter. That's what they sent. They were sending out grandstream devices with built in NAT routers before, but I guess they ran out.
Set it up initially, made a test call, worked fine. I put it behind my pfSense BSD firewall.
However, a day after is when I started having no audio on incoming calls (outgoing were fine). The registration also disappeared. Connected to the cable modem directly it seemed to work sometimes. It may seem like a problem with my firewall but I am not sure.
The plus is that support did try to work it out with me. I give them an A for effort.
The minus is that I never got it working properly.
Not really their fault, and the CEO who posts in DSLR VoIP forums did say that they aren't really router friendly and that they'd prefer to use their devices as the router where they are inline. Not an acceptable solution for me because I have devices on my network such as slingbox which need to be accessible from outside. I also prefer to run my own router.
I switched to callcentric with my old Sunrocket gizmo (Telco systems AC-211) and it's been fine. Vonage with my Cisco ATA186 also had no problems up until I canceled.
I can only guess that they have some sort of config that will cause problems with pfSense or other BSD based routers. Best to either stay away if you have one of those, or prepare to use the device inline.
The good part is that you get 30 days money back so if you want to try the service you can without worrying whether you lose money if it works or not.
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Review by Gbhanot
member for 4.4 years, 61 visits, last login: 4 years ago
updated 4.1 years ago
- Wilmington,New Castle,DE
- $18 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 5 days
- "Responsive Customer Service"
- "Unreliable service, unprofessional, un-ethical company"
- "Don't go by just Good reviews, Check the tech forum for their problems."
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The only good thing I can say about VOIPo is that their Customer service is very responsive. You get reply of your tickets within few hours. But how much they can maintain it once customer base is UP is ???
I signed up for Voipo in December, 2008, when they launched the service. The service worked good for one week and then never worked properly. I used the serive when it worked but I really don't consider a service working properly, if every day morning you have to restart the adaptor 2-3 time to get it registered and call a number many times to get it connected.
Before this, I used Lingo, Sunrocket, Net2Phone, Joip, Tmobile@home, but never had so many issues with any service. Lingo had some problems initially, but it was nothing compared to VOIPo. I was part of each and every outage VOIPo had. ( It was always quoted by VOIPo that Outage is affecting only a small number of customers, but strangely, I was always part of every outage they had ).
So finally I sent back adapter in first week of March. I paid $135 for a year. VOIPo charged me for three months @ $18/month for the service which had so many issues in past three months and were accepted by their CEO also. I was expecting 11.25 per month calculated from 135/year, 'cuz while joining, when I asked CSR about cancellation, I was told that they will refund pro-rated amount for unused period. I have posted the chat transcript with their serive rep, which clearly says that they will refund pro-rated amount.
When I posted my experience on the Voip Tech Chat forum on this site, Company's CEO did put some cooked up figures saying my usage figures on the site saying that I am lying and service worked very well. I was totally taken by surprise, how a company can be so unprofessional, unethical that they can got to the extent of posting customer's personal data on the public forum, just to prove their point.
When I Posted the actual figures for a month, Company CEO replied that, that is just for a month and given me method of calculating the calls which was adding current calls to all the previous calls. I don't know if he didn't know about his own site or he tried to look ignorant. But Anyone who has serive with VOIPo, can check on their site that we can not see 3 month old calls in the current log and can not see new calls in the old call log.
Finally in a personal message, CEO of the company agreed that he got the transcript of CHAT with the CSR and is crediting me that amount because the information was conveyed in-correctly.
So Guys, decide yourself, Can you trust this kind of company? They called me liar on a public forum whereas all their claims were wrong.
Now, look at the forum of Voip Tech chat and decide how many problems VOIPo had from December to March. The problem was upto the extent that they had to recall the adaptor for masses. Even if they say serive is fine, will you really trust them?.
Anyway I am glad that I am out and not wasting any more money and time.
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Review by havahava
member for 4.2 years, 4 visits, last login: 4.2 years ago
updated 4.2 years ago
- Fairfax,Fairfax,VA
- $13 per month
- (12 month contract)
- about 55 days
- "Great Support Stuff , courteous and willing to help"
- "You need too much help from the support staff to make this work , mine is still not resolved"
- "VOIPO not ready for prime time or has too many issues that still needs to be ironed out"
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I have been with VOIPO for 2 months now and haven't had a week of trouble free service. The only time I did not have to interact with support was when I was on vacation for 10 days.
Issues :
1) Static on my phone , after some tweaking yesterday seems like one way. I could barely hear the other side but my voice was loud and clear.
2) Sometimes the phone rings and I pickup the phone and it's dead air, sometimes the phone doesn't ring at all and fails over to my cell phone.
3) Interestingly I have found that rebooting Grandstream ATA fixes the problem ( everytime) . I even tried one of those timers that switches off/on the adapter every night but not much help. So now before making a call I reboot my ATA and then call people.
4) Support has moved me around to different servers but of no avail. They addressed the STUN server issue but of no avail.
5) Support shipped me Linksys PAPT2 , it didn't work but support was able to identify DNS issues. After it got resolved it worked for 3 hrs and it stopped registering. Support says it is some wierd issue .
If I were to charge minimum pay for the amount of time I have spent with customer support this service turns out to be far more expensive than Vonage which by the way worked just fine behind the very same ISP and router for 5 years.
I am sure this service will improve given the quality of support folks but I really like a service where you don't even need to call support. As regards Vonage I had 1 call to customer service in 5 yrs I was with them.
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