Vonage is Evil - friday 2008-10-03 1951 last modified 2008-10-03 1951
Categories: Nerdy
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I was going to let my termination of Vonage services this past spring pass without comment since the web has ample description of how unpleasant an experience that can be, but things just got worse with them. Of course, they simply would not allow me to leave, wasting a good long time attempting to re-sign me with "incentives," asking personal questions I wasn't about to answer. I probably could have ended all discussion by telling them I had no internet service in my car, but that's not something I felt like sharing with whatever remote Indian call center Vonage uses (to be clear, the woman I was speaking with had an Indian name and accent). How many times do you have to say "no" until the script lets you go on? Too many.

That alone isn't worth mentioning considering all that's out there concerning the baseness of Vonage's service and retention department, but what pushes my disdain over the edge into post-worthy territory is how they appear to have sold their customer list to spammers. For a long time I used to use per-site email addresses to find out and cut off whoever was sending spam. Since Bayesian filtering came along, I've mostly stopped doing that. But my Vonage registration was a Vonage-only address. And that address has, this year to date, received 2325 of ~58,000 pieces of spam. I'll be shutting that address down.

VoIP is great, but Vonage's business practices leaves much to be desired. I won't be giving my money to scummy friends of spammers again. Let's get someone with more integrity started in the field.

Comments

Do-it-yourself....

I have signed up with "wholesale" carriers and run asterisk on my co-located server. I had trouble with one carrier (icall.com/termination.com, supposedly an American company out of CT, but the credit card is billed from Israel) that stopped responding to support requests, but my other carrier (gafachi.com) has been excellent (though they don't have incoming numbers, other than toll-free and rochester, ny, so I just signed up with IDV.net, and so far they have been good, but I have only been with them a week.

I am getting to the place where I am hosting people besides myself, but I can't really advertise it yet, since I don't have any GUIs or anything where people can edit stuff themselves.

Jon Daley on October 04, 2008 01:35 AM

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