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Review by oshkosh See Profile

  • Location: Toronto, ON, Canada
  • Business customer Business customer
  • Cost: $45 per month
Honestly can't find any good
Worst customer service, major service outages, no customer privacy
Avoid this company at all costs. 2 tin cans and a string work better than this provider.
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

Hi everyone! So been meaning to write this review of Anveo for awhile. I know 100% as soon as I do, Anveo will be on here posting replies saying I'm a liar etc which is fine. As long as even one person avoids this company due to this review I'll be happy.

So my background goes back about 3-4 years now when we were in one office location just starting up. We first used Hosted Phone from Allstream which was I believe $33.50 or something per user a month and ran over T1 and not the Internet. It worked well for our 9 seats for 8 months or so, then we moved to a new office. Here it kept going down on us which turned out to be due to poor line quality in the building so I cancelled it. (Also because I realized paying per month for a conference phone etc that barely got used wasn't worth it). It was around that time I started reading and learning about Asterisk.

Because I had a few older PCs lying around I decided to give it a try and tested it out. I had no idea how VoIP worked back then, so bought a TDM card or whatever they were to support 4 business lines. I bought a Cisco IP phone to test it all out with and installed 4 business lines from Allstream. The problem was there was severe echo on all calls to the point that we couldn't even use the phones. I didn't have the funds to buy a hardware echo card to test it so we just gave up. I then tried adding voip.ms as a trunk to it, and made some test calls with one of my staff members. We used the Cisco phone, an iPhone soft phone and some others, and tried 5 calls at once on our Cable connection and they worked great. So we decided to give it a go, bought a ton of Cisco phones and set it all up with voip.ms, porting our numbers to them. We used voip.ms for our DIDs, I think it was CallCentric for our inbound toll free calls, and then some other local provider for $30 per trunk for unlimited outgoing calls.

Things worked great for over a year but we started having some issues with choppy calls even though we hadn't changed anything config wise. I started to think it was the PC we were using, and around that time I learned about hosted Asterisk and PBX providers. I then realized it wasn't worth paying $30 for unlimited trunks and using 3 providers so we moved everything to voip.ms and to some hosted Asterisk provider. I can't remember who it was now but was something like $25 a month or so. We had a lot of issues with them where sometimes we would make calls and would hear other people's conversations, sometimes in other languages.

I then switched to yet another hosted provider, and then again to another one. Finally the call quality issues stopped, and we were happy as now we could have an IP phone at everyone's home in case we wanted to work from home, which wasn't possible with our cable connection at the office.

We used that setup for over a year or so, until a two and a half or so ago when I moved everything to Rackspace. We use Sugar CRM as our CRM system so I decided to put Asterisk and SugarCRM on the same platform on Rackspace. This worked well until a month or so ago when suddenly we couldn't access Sugar or Asterisk, we were getting web and PHP errors and having a ton of problems. I moved Sugar to a new Rackspace instance and decided I'd had it with managing my own PBX so decided to look to Anveo.

I had tested them maybe a year ago but with the Cisco phones we would get one way audio non stop. This time it seemed that I'd get 2 way audio, so I did a lot of tests then finally bit the bullet, thinking you usually get what you pay for, so let's pay the $45 a month for the business plan and finally have a better service. As soon as I did that, I realized on inbound calls we still got one way audio and that I had only tested outbound calls. I have a Polycom IP 330 phone so decided to try that, and it worked for 2 way audio, so I bought a few more online.

I set up a DID with Anveo and configured my call flows. Due to their limited visual call flow, our existing menu wouldn't work, as it basically said "dial your extension at any time or press # to search our directory" 2 features Anveo does not support, so I had to pay to have our main menu re-recorded. I also submitted a port request to move all our lines over to Anveo and registered the Polycom phones to them.

That's when the fun began. First we started noticing that we couldn't call a certain toll free number, and would only get a busy signal. We are a partner for a very large company in Ontario, and that toll free number is for Partner's to call in for support. Anveo told me it worked for them, and the reason it didn't for me was that it was geographically blocked, which was total bs. Calling it from my cell, or voip.ms with the same caller ID would work every time. I gave that info to them, and never heard back on my ticket.

Next we started noticing that when we would make a call, especially to toll free, it would ring twice before it even actually started ringing the destination. I always use TD Canada Trust as my test number, and when you call them it says "Thank you for calling TD Canada Trust Easy Line". When I'd call them from Anveo, it would ring twice, then go "anada Trust Easy Line" missing the first half. This was also the same on inbound calls to our IVR set up with them. Calling from a cell phone would do nothing for 10-15 seconds then finally it would ring, and then our IVR would pick up but already be 3-4 seconds into the greeting. It did this from softphones, IP phones and Anveo Communicator, eliminating an issue with the actual phone.

All this time I started noticing as well how poor their website was, being completely littered with spelling errors everywhere (and even posted them all in another thread on here). Literally every page had some sort of spelling mistake or typo. Not a huge issue but found it odd since this is a professional company that is expected to power our business communications.

We set up Amazon S3 to handle our call recordings, and after a day or so noticed that outbound calls weren't being recorded. Opened a ticket and was told it was a problem on their end so they fixed that.

I then tried using the Anveo Communicator to make calls outbound so they would ring on my cell and be placed from there. All the calls come from area code 212 though which is long distance to my cell phone, making that feature useless. I also enabled SMS notifications of new voicemail, which worked, but were from a European number with 011 country code, charging me as an international text message. I also one day logged into Anveo and noticed that I had new voicemail, even though it was supposed to email me when I got new ones (and had in the past, but just ignored this one with no notification in my spam either.).

The other issue I have is that Anveo is 100% not designed for business users. If you have an office with 10 users, you need to make an Anveo account for each of those users to be able to use an IP phone. When the main user logs in, it shows everyones voicemail in your inbox, and not just your own. Users also cannot view their own call logs from their own portal, as according to Anveo that's by design. So if someone calls your toll free number and calls a user by extension which is set to go to their SIP device, that's not tracked. Only calls to their DID assigned to them are tracked. The main administrator is the only one that can track them.

These were all annoying but manageable so we dealt with it, until this past Friday. Not going to get into it all again as there's threads all about this, but suddenly our phones completely stopped working. I tried logging into the Anveo portal but it wouldn't load at all. 30 minutes later it was the same thing, so I went on their support chat and was told they were under a DDos attack that would be fixed soon. 3 hours later our phones still would not work. Calls to our Anveo DID would fail, and outbound calls failed as well. So I posted on the forum here my issues I was having, and luckily still had our Asterisk system running so switched the phones back over to that.

That's when Anveo (keep in mind this is a company), posted all my personal information, name, toll free number, etc into the forum, calling me a flat out liar. First they write that there have been no calls to my DID for weeks which is completely untrue. It's also ridiculous as of course there weren't calls on that day as their services were down. They then tried to say I only have 1 SIP account, when we have 3. Then they tried to associate me with some other posts that I have no idea what they're referring to, and basically call me a flat out liar. Luckily I took screen shots and am in contact with a lawyer over this, but I'm honestly floored that a company handles negative feedback by calling their customers liars and posting their personal information in a forum. Imagine if Bell Canada or AT&T started doing that?? I want to make sure everyone knows about this as if you're considering running your business on Anveo, they have absolutely zero privacy and can't handle criticism at all.

They'll probably reply to this calling me a liar, which is totally fine. Luckily I've had no less than 4 people PM me on here since this happened who have all experienced the same situations with them and were happy to hear they aren't alone. I strongly suggest that people try this company out long and hard before actually using it for production. Anveo likes to post that I work for some competitor and just post lies to hurt them, which is total nonsense. I could care less about this company, as we aren't even in the same country. I'm more than happy to share my personal information and what I do for anyone that PMs me to show I have no affiliation with Asterisk providers or anyone else.

Any time I receive poor customer service or a bad experience I always write a review to let people know about it, and do so as well when I have a very good experience. This was by far one of the worst I've had and has cost me a lot for my business. I now have a $30+ balance sitting on Anveo which is useless, I had to pay to re-record my main menu greetings, had to buy new IP phones, and lost 4 hours when our phones weren't working when customers were trying to call us. If anyone has any other questions definitely PM me, definitely don't mind explaining my situation further at all. Thanks for reading!

member for 11.5 years, 31 visits, last login: 11.3 years ago
updated 11.5 years ago