Phonebooth consistant outages of service.

Ratings

Posted: 06/30/2009

Phonebooth consistant outages of service.

Reviewed by: unclebeen (xxx.xxx.241.37)

I'm writing this while in the midst of what is now going on 50 minutes of outage of the Phonebooth service. I fear I'm in store for a repeat of events from 3 months ago, when this happened at least once a week from 10:30am to about 11:30am for about 3 weeks, where outside callers try to call in and don't hear a ring, just dead air, on our side we hear the ring and pick up, but we can't then hear the caller and they can't hear us. Bandwidth.com eventually seems to "fix" the problem, but fails to keep their promise of issuing an explanation of what happened and what measures they've taken to fix it permanently; then it happens again almost as clock work the next week. Beyond that, we seem to have intermittent trouble with the phone service fairly constantly, especially if the call is outside of a few hundred miles of our location.

We've done everything they've recommended to insure quality service, like we got a Tier 1 internet connection through them, put the entire phone system on a separate dedicated LAN, yet, after doing all that, we kept dealing with the exact same periodic disturbances in service that we were experiencing before we did that.

I don't know if their SIP Trunks avoid all these issues, but I guess we'll find out, because the Phonebooth service apparently doesn't work reliably enough to be used in a real world environment.

Personally, I'd recommend staying away from the Phonebooth experiment until you start seeing a stream of positive reviews about its quality from long time customers. We've been a customer for more than 6 months now, and they definitely are making improvements, but the service is just not reliable and not worth the risk, and we're going to have to go to something else.