Vonage - www.vonage.co.uk

Have been without inbound calls for 10 days now. No news from Vonage as to when they will fix it. Described as an "occasional scripting problem with UK customers"... A fix on their US servers is still awaited. I don't get updates unless I call them. Pretty bad really. Their compensation terms seem unfair and unreasonable to me - 20p per day I think - and could do with a legal challenge.

The call quality we have experienced initially has been variable - echo / delay.

I've used the service for several years. The technology has improved over the years and is ok. Not nearly as good call quality as for example Sykpe but it's ok. However, ever time I have to speak to one of their customer service reps (usually not uk based by the sound of it) it drives me mad. Complete incompetence. Unhelpful. Scripted . Awful. If you are not using them I'd suggest staying away as it's not worth the hassle.

Gone over to Vonage from a BT landline. I read all the online reviews of Vonage & there are plenty of not so satisfied ones. However, many of these are a few years old & both bandwidth & technology has moved on since. The phone call to order it up was straight forward & pleasant. The box arrived two days later & set up was also straight forward & took approx 20 mins.

To be honest, I wasn't actually expecting much at all, these days it seems almost impossible to expect what you "should" get. To my utter delight, it all works perfectly! The line/voice clarity is actually superior to my BT landline! Using the broadband (laptop etc) at the same time makes no difference to the call at all. The features & value for money are outstanding here. Having full control of your account online & access to it, including voice-mail from anywhere is also a big bonus.

All in all, I am absolutely delighted with Vonage & the VOIP service I receive.

The customer service I received through Vonage has been a nightmare. I am a generally calm and friendly person, but the reps at Vonage pushed my blood pressure up and they really almost got a good ol' cussin. I was blown away at how the reps treated me like I didn't have any common sense, made canceling a nightmare, and added extra fees wherever they could. I would definitely NOT recommend them to anyone. The service was fine, but if you ever plan on canceling or moving or anything else that requires customer service, FORGET IT! It is also a principle issue: If I am spending my hard earned money with your company, I deserve to be treated with respect and not robbed by extra "fees" that were previously never mentioned. RIP OFF!!!

On October, 2011 our outgoing calls were blocked by Vonage. We were told the card was declined for payment (which was attempted without prior notice) so the lines have been blocked. Being a 5 year long client having almost 60 lines, Vonage did not have even the slightest of courtesy to call and ask us about it. As Vonage is clearly aware that we are a sales call centre operating with significant number of lines hired through you with enormous number of outgoing calls. Our sales depend on our phone lines. For the whole day, off and on our lines were down for over 5 hours.

There has not been any communication by Vonage as to the decline of card, the suspension of outgoing calls or payment due before the invoicing date. Neither could we get a hold of any supervisor dspite numerous attempts.

In May 2011 (after it had already happened once in September 2010) the phone lines went down for outgoings. We had to suffer the whole day’s sales loss. We were not aware of the situation and Vonage lead us to believe that it was our fault that the card was not going through. The May 2011 incident was the second one of same nature. As soon as the lines were down we called Vonage helpline and they advised that payment was due, we told the representative that you have the card number, we can give you the expiry/security code. We were told Vonage already has that info but the card did not go through. We gave another card and it went fine.

All this happened again in October. On 20th October all day long off and on and then on 21st October morning again. The call records below will show you the times and dates of the calls.

If the lines are down, our business is down as long it does not get fixed. As admitted by the representatives and account management team, it was a glitch in Vonage’s system which “erroneously” changed our account status to “make a payment” which happens when a payment is overdue. In our case, there was not even an invoice created for a charge as the date for monthly invoice is the 28th of every month. Vonage charges our card periodically during a month for significant amounts as we progress with usage.

The problem as admitted by vonage reps. this was also with vonage’s online charging system which did not accept the credit cards we gave. After the 2 credit cards we gave you a third (debit) card which went through fine. This was after a long verbal brawl that the representative actually charged the card without waiting when she was told that it has been almost 3 hours since the lines are down.

There is evidently no devised way at vonage to update an account with an ongoing and recurrent issue for clients so that a representative could know what has been happening. Every time we call we need to go through the same security questions which delays the issue resolution at hand and then the representative appears at a loss about the problem and we have to reprise the whole situation from start to help them understand the severity of it.

The complaint handling procedure is so long and vonage has devised a period of 5 working days, which is the whole week and matters such as this for a sales call centre are time sensitive.

We had to call the “account manager – if you want to leave vonage” every time so that our query could be addressed immediately.

We spoke with the helpline who took the card details for new card in the morning, and did not return to us for the next hour or so. Following it up we found that they needed to get authorization from supervisor to charge new cards.

Then we rang back only to find there is delay. We spoke to John (ID 57410) who said the card was declined.

We called back again with a new card and spoke with Janice who took the card and charged it there and then while I was on phone. Now why would the other people not charge if the facility was already available, instead they made us wait for hours and caused loss of business. The service was activated

This was not the end of it, to our horror, within 15 minutes the lines went back offline. We rang again and spoke to Janice again, someone charged 1 more pound and made the status active.

Within 2minutes, it all started all over again. I had to call account management again, they told us there was some glitch in manual charging update with online update etc etc, they turned off (suspended) the account and reactivated it. This helped in keeping the service active for a couple of hours until around 6 pm when it all went blank and it happened again.

I had asked John to put me through to a supervisor the second time I spoke with him, I had to hold for over 20 minutes before I hung up and called again.

I was stressed out and called at 6 and spoke with Karen who reactivated it and told me she was “ESCALATING” this matter and senior management will address this issue immediately.

Next morning, the outgoing was blocked again for over 2 hours. We had to talk to many reps. and no supervisor called us despite our demand. Instead we had to keep following it with your people.

There have been several billing disputes as well for which Vonage did not pay us back, rather kept those sums of money for future payments.

Bad Bad Bad!!! "Un fair use policy" means 33 hours a month for Vonage. Apparently that is what they call UNLIMITED calls on their call plans.

The average usage is 1 hour a day in their plans even though i specified that I would need 80 hours a month.

STAY AWAY if you want unlimited calls.

People please do not belive VONAGE or recommend VONAGE to anybody. I was using vonage for past 3 months, While buying the product I was checking with them for more than 4 times about the product and happily they sold it to me. After using it for the first month, I got a warning mail stated as, they have fair usage policy of 2000 mins, where it was not mentioned any where on the plan(still in their website its shown as UNLIMITED) and not told by any representative when I was enquiring them. Now its waste of money and if i want to return it but i have to pay the termination fee, so waiting for a year to get complete to throw this stupid device away.

ITS A BOGUS COMPANY, trying to cheat people with the term "unlimited", though its good to carry anywhere as a local number, but they should try to be loyal to the customer by telling the FAIR USAGE policy and other stuff.

Really fed up.

Absolutely Awful. I am on my second device and still no luck with keeping it connected. Really unstable devices/service - everytime I turn the internet off and on the devices crashes and shows and "OO2 no internet error" even though I have full internet access on my computers. I have spent literally hours and hours on the phone to the technical helpdesk turning the machines off and on - off and on again and again and again, changing the cables, rebooting etc etc . Having done everything they said - it still doesn't work. They told me I would get a call back from the manager - but that never happened. Sending it back and putting it down to experience. I would NEVER recommend Vonage.

I'm delighted with Vonage UK. I signed up to Vonage's India VPlan 4i and I'm amazed at the cheapness and voice quality. I can talk for hours with my relatives now without the worry of spending ££'s. Definate must for people who need to phone locally and abroad!

After getting phone bills over over £70 from our current provider we decided to look around and settled with Vonage.co.uk

Our order was processed quickly and we paid the initial £29 sign up, equipment and postage charge (£8.99 monthly afterwards). The service was up and running within 30 minutes of plugging in the Vonage box with our old phones and cable modem.

At first we were not happy with the call quality but after calling the freephone technical support we had that rectified in an hour or so and wow, our most recent bill was only £28 and that's calling the same numbers/mobiles etc as we previously had done with our old provider.

Features: Included is caller ID, voicemail (with custom message recording), full online real time billing and control panel, telephone number from anywhere in the world (more or less, including local area codes), freephone technical support, helpful staff, high call quality and more.

Overall we are very impressed with the server, it does not affect our internet connection at all and it just works, simple to set up and easy to use.

You do need a stable internet connection for it to work, we are with Virgin Media and its great.