[Asterisk-Users] Broadvoice experience

[Jerry Glomph Black]

I really don't find all this trashing of BV on this discussion very fair.

1) They are a big commercial service, great 'unlimited' packages, most credible
    competitor to Vonage.  The in-state-unlimited is a great POTS-replacement
    deal.
2) Unlike Vonage, they play along with Asterisk and other soft clients at no
    extra charge, even fixing some retry-bugs in the asterisk
    SIP channel module.  Both 'Olle' patches work fine for me.

I run asterisk on a NATed LAN, connecting to numerous providers (sipgate, 
stanaphone, FWD, Broadvoice, voipjet, simpletelecom, gafachi, .....) plus 
several * sites I run for my (non-telecom) employer around the world.   They all 
have their pluses & minuses.

BV's big minus to me has been their customer service, and their website.  They 
recently really improved the website, no longer requiring the use of some 
satanic Java/activeX horror just to review your account.

The customer service needs a major upgrade at BV.  I had a problem related to a 
number change I requested.  This number change triggered a (silent) change to 
the SIP secret on my account, which the service rep could not detect.  After 3 
days of calls and emails (Mostly ignored) I reached the manager of the 
operation, who was really nice and injected a new, working SIP secret in their 
system, the whole thing took 30 seconds.

This comes down to further required work on their customer-handling backend 
stuff.  Any account changes should trigger an email with the new setup 
parameters.  These setup parameters should be accessible on the website! (as all 
of the above-named competitors do!).  If this were done properly, I would have 
saved a lot of my time and aggravation, and would have consumed NO expensive 
human-time on their end.

You have to call or write (I did better with calling) to get your password from 
customer service, and the answer you get may not be correct!   I think this is 
the result of a (flawed) policy to keep most of the turnkey customers from 
playing with SIP hardware configurations.

I was within a millimeter of dropping the service this week, but after 
persisting, I reached two really nice customer-service guys on the phone, who 
for now convinced me (not via marketing blah, but their helpful attitude) to 
hang on.

On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Kannaiyan Natesan wrote:

> A complete rubbish service in the whole world, which is spoiling the asterisk 
> mailing list.