VoipReview12

We have had some problems with voice quality and down time for the past 90 days. I believe this is due to overloaded phone.com servers. Regardless of the reason, these failures were tremendously embarrassing for us. We had to apologize to everyone we spoke with on the phone and warn them that the voice quality would likely degrade after 10 minutes. Then we would have to call them back and that call would last another 10 minutes and then that call would fail and so on. There were also two situations where the phones actually completely failed for an hour or so each time. And then we also were getting people telling us that they were calling our phone number and were getting a message about the phone not being in service. None of these issues were permanent but instead were sporadic and over time.
We were on the phone with phone.com support at least twice a week. They had us run through all kinds of things - we upgraded our internet speed, rebooted things, punched holes in our firewall and so on. Nothing made a difference. The support guys were super eager to help but completely tight lipped about anything on their end. So everything they wanted me to do was on the assumption that the problems were MY fault.
After more than 2 months of this, we decided to hedge our bets and contacted several alternative VOIP providers. We ended up creating a redundant VOIP system using Vonage business. Same hardware on our end, same network. So, the only difference was one system used Vonage Business and the other used Phone.com. I was super loyal to Phone.com and really didn't want to change vendors unless I was certain that the problem was not us but Phone.com. Our conclusion was that the quality problem was with Phone.com servers and not us. When we used Vonage business, we never had any of the problems we saw with phone.com. We tested that new configuration side-by-side over a 2 week period and Vonage was better from a voice quality and stability standpoint.
After a bit more research I think there's a few things to consider when picking a VOIP vendor. Ask them if they have a SLA. Ask if they have redundant data centers. Ask them how much down time is acceptable. Also, ask them if they run their own servers or are renting servers from a third party. I don't know exactly how Phone.com has their back end configuration set up - they never told with me that the problem I was experiencing was on their end and not my end. However, I suspect that their growth has been so fast that it has outstripped what their servers can handle. By the time you read this hopefully they will have fixed these growing pains. But, in my case we decided we could not risk our companies reputation on the growing pains of our VOIP provider and we did switch to Vonage business.
I was a happy phone.com customer for more than 2 years. However the quality problems over the past 2 months forced me to switch.