Matthew's Journal

Since I moved, my Vonage VoIP internet phone service hasn't been working properly. I was receiving a lot of audio nose and I could barely make out incoming voices.

Through some troubleshooting, I isolated to cause of the problem to my Linksys RTP300 Vonage phone adapter. I tried to get Vonage customer support to transfer my telephone number to an alternate Vonage adapter that I had purchased a while ago. The service tech I was talking to ran into an error while trying to transfer my number. He said that he would have his supervisor work on the problem and that I would be called back, but the call never came. I did some extensive reading on the Vonage support internet forums and I came up with something to try. Vonage has a tool on their website where I move my number to a different port on my existing Vonage adapter (it has two). I did that this morning and it solved all my problems. I'm a little annoyed that Vonage customer support wasn't able to help me more. I essentially had to figure out and fix the problem entirely on my own.

I still think internet-based phone services are great because they are cheap and offer a lot of great features you can't get with traditional service. However, they're a royal pain when you have hardware that's not working correctly. I guess a positive thing to come out of this is that I can now troubleshoot VoIP problems fairly quickly.