Re: VoIP recommendations

On Thu, 2007-01-18 at 18:11 -0800, Meredith L. Patterson wrote:

> Which Vonage router do you have?

Well, I first had... (you know it's bad when I start this way)... I
first had the linksys router. I love the linksys folks in principle for
their openness, even though I don't use this. However, the
administrative features and web interface stink compared to dlink, which
is really not such a high bar. In particular, I wanted port redirection
(ie wan :xxx -> lan :yyy); dlink's done this for years on several models
but the linksys wrtp54g can't.

Anyway, after ~9 months of problems and many many many phone calls (30?)
to tech support, each time with the wait, running the gauntlet of really
mediocre L1 engineers ("okay, so please reboot one more time and we'll
have it..."), I'd eventually get to, invariably, the most gregarious L2
engineers I've ever talked with. After a few "how's your mom?" and
"What's the weather like there?", he'd get down to business by
disparaging the competence of the previous L1 and ALL of the other L2s,
and then he'd say "I tweaked the frobonizer, it'll take 15 minutes to go
into effect, you're all set". Bullpucky.

Then an L2 said my linksys was probably flaky and that he'd send a
replacement. Four days later, I got it, it worked, but the sporadic
problems remained. A month later, I got a bill for the replacement.
WTH!?! Apparently, they were supposed to include return materials but
didn't, and now they were billing me for not returning the router. After
escalating to a manager, we essentially got into a pickle - - they
wouldn't pay for return shipping and neither would I. I disputed the
charge with my card company and that was the last straw -- I've already
initiated the move elsewhere.

Thank for listening. It's been therapeutic to get this off my chest.

--
Reece Hart, http://harts.net/reece/, GPG:0x25EC91A0
./universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -protonmass 1.673e-27 -uspres bush
kernel warning: universe consuming too many resources. Killing.
universe killed due to catastrophic leadership. Try -uspres carter.