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I gave Lingo a try in early July after a friend in another state signed up for Lingo and was raving about the good rates. I have a fairly decent and reliable cable-based broadband connection ( Adelphia in Colorado, 2-3M downstream, 256k upstream), so I figured Lingo would have a good chance of working well. The equipment arrived fairly quickly (3-4 days). I was charged the standard $39.90 rate (including shipping). I tried very hard to make Lingo work well over the course of two weeks and then finally pulled the plug on the trial, feeling frustrated and disappointed with my experience. I'll describe a number of technical and service issues I ran into. Lingo VOIP adapter instability as an internet router: I tried the Lingo VOIP adapter both on the inside and outside of my firewall/router (a new Netgear WGT 624). I found the Lingo VOIP adapter to be far too unstable to function as a router with the Netgear running behind it, and I would frequently see the VOIP light drop out. When this would happen, the Lingo adapter would take my internet connectivity down with it. Keeping the Lingo VOIP adapter behind the Netgear proved to be a much more stable configuration. The VOIP service would drop periodically (without a corresponding loss of broadband service), but at least in this configuration my broadband service could not held hostage by the Lingo device. When the VOIP service would drop, I found it was necessary to reset the power on the Lingo adapter in order to regain VOIP service. The Lingo adapter would not re-establish connectivity in a timely manner on it's own after a drop. On a call to Lingo tech support they acknowledged it could take the device several hours to regain service after a drop --- so they seemed to know this was an issue. They acknowledged there wasn't really a solution for this problem other than to reset the power on the Lingo adapter. At one point, I was resetting the power 5-6 times per day. Low frequency noise from the Lingo VOIP adapter. One thing I would notice with my telephone equipment when using the Lingo VOIP service was a distinct low frequency humming noise coming from the adapter that was not present when using the same telephone equipment through my regular analog phone lines (I was using a multiline phone with both lingo and the analog lines connected, so comparisons were easy). On a call to Lingo tech support the tech mentioned a couple of other customers had complained of similar problems and they were investigating whether the adapters were not as well grounded internally as they could have been. I tried relocating the Lingo adapter to several other AC plugs and then eventually on a UPS that does power filtering with no improvement. Incoming Caller ID times of January 1st: On incoming Lingo calls, the caller ID would frequently register January 1st, effectively resetting the time on all my phones. This was a major annoyance. Lingo support indicated they knew about this problem. Poor Call Quality: Over two weeks I made about 600 minutes worth of test phone calls to various friends and family both in the US and Canada. I would frequently receive complaints about the quality of my voice (upstream) from the party I was calling but generally heard the party clearly on my end (downstream). The complaints about my voice quality (upstream) were that I sounded like I was on a really bad cellphone connection. One party I did have good luck making calls to was another Lingo customer in another state. We tried to perform heavy file transfers (both upstream and downstream) on both our respective broadband connections while engaged in a VOIP phone conversation and there rarely seemed to be a degradation in call quality. I was pretty puzzled by this inconsistency in results .... it appeared as though Lingo was having issues with call quality on calls routed to phone exchanges outside their network, but in-network things seemed to be pretty decent. If this was simply a matter of the 256k of upstream bandwidth on my cable connection being insufficient (Vonage only claims 90k is necessary), I would expect the calls during file transfer tests to be significantly degraded, but they were not. Customer Service and Techical Support: So, I've established that I had a number of technical issues and made reference to tech support calls. I spoke several times with technical support who I would initially deal with in India. The folks in India were generally polite but would frequently tell me their system was down and to call back later, so it would take several tries before I could file a case. This became frustrating after a while, but I vowed to be patient. My concerns about call quality, low frequency noise, and router stability were escalated to the 2nd level support folks in McLean, VA. It took the folks in McLean 4-5 days to call back from the time I had contacted someone in India during a time "their system was working." At one point, the folks in McLean indicated they would need to escalate the ongoing technical issues I was having to some more senior folks in McLean. They said customer success seemed to vary based on what part of the US the customer was in (I was in CO). I was promised a call back. After 5 days of waiting for a callback from Tier 3 in McLean, I decided that I didn't want to put up with the ongoing technical issues, poor Lingo response times, and constant complaints about call quality any longer. It was looking like an ongoing relationship with Lingo was going to be too painful to pay $20 a month for. I figured it was better to get out of the relationship with Lingo while I was still within the 30 day trial period, so I made the decision to terminate service. On a call with the Lingo disconnections group (India), I was told they could see my open tickets and was offered a chance to have instant technical support from McLean if I remained on the line and gave them another chance. I told the rep that I had given Lingo a really fair shake and a call to pull the plug on service was the wrong time to be offering all the resources to help me out. I was pleaded with to give Lingo another 6 months to work their issues out but I told the rep I couldn't see paying for this level of ongoing frustration. Eventually, I was given an RMA number and location in McLean to ship the equipment to. I shipped the equipment via UPS on July 22nd. UPS tracking shows Primus received the equipment on July 28th. After 4 calls over the last 4 weeks to follow up on the credit for the cancellation of service, it's now August 28th and I still don't have a credit. The folks in India keep saying they've escalated to the provisioning folks but nothing ever seems to happen. After a month of no action from Lingo, I finally called my credit card company and have put the original $39.90 charge in dispute due to Lingo's failure to resolve the credit on my account in a timely manner. Summary: So, Lingo didn't work for me ... they really didn't have their act together, and the whole experience has soured me on VOIP service for now. I'd like to congratulate everyone who's had good luck with Lingo. I spent the time writing this review to help those folks out who might be considering giving Lingo a try. You might be better off spending an extra $10 a month with Vonage. member for 19.5 years, 9 visits, last login: 18 years ago lodged 19.5 years ago
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