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Review by Mango See Profile

  • Location: www.toao.net
  • Cost: $18 per month
  • Install: about 1 days
Service is not reliable, call quality is hit-and-miss, echo, tech support is friendly and local but cannot solve many problems.
Providers like this give VoIP a bad name.
Pre Sales information:
Install Co-ordination:
Connection reliability:
Tech Support:
Services:
Value for money:

A friend recommended DigitalVoice to me and they were my reintroduction to the world of VoIP. Unfortunately, both of us have been experiencing similar problems. For a while, sometimes weeks, the service will be excellent. And then all of a sudden it'll take a nose dive. Perhaps the phones will quit ringing, perhaps the calling party won't be able to hear us, perhaps we won't be able to hear them. I would tweak settings madly on my adapters with no success and suddenly have the service start working perfectly later with no interaction from me.

Their tech support is very friendly and local, and to their credit that's a rarity, however they were never able to provide a firm diagnosis of any problem or resolve it. It seemed all they were able to do was restore the default settings on my adapter and tell me to call back if the problem returned. And maybe for a few weeks everything would be fine, but then the service would die again, sometimes for days at a time. I swapped out every single piece of equipment I could: modem, router, the adapters multiple times, with different brands whenever possible. I set up QoS rules so well that I could run torrents at full speed and have calls uninterrupted...when DigitalVoice was having a good day.

I had to dial 911 once and discovered to my annoyance that I did not receive the advertised e911 but instead basic 911. According to their website, I had set up e911 correctly, but my call was still sent to a national 911 call centre and routed from there to Vancouver. I was surprised to note that this took quite some time - probably 45 seconds to a minute. Fortunately, the emergency was not life-threatening.

I decided to switch providers when one day I used an analog phone line to check my voicemail remotely, and to my surprise noticed the same quality issues. This was a confirmation for me that the issues I was experiencing were not to do with my equipment. I have since switched to Shaw Digital Phone at the office and VoIP.ms at home and have (so far!) had success with these providers.

member for 15.2 years, 7790 visits, last login: 1 day ago
updated 15.1 years ago