[sri70s1]

I am not sure, anybody elsed experienced this. When you call BV support, it takes atleast 30 to 45 minutes of music to get somebody answer your call. Most of the answers are, if you have a problem, do a provisioning and reboot your whole network...

For the 7th day, I hadn't got any reply from them, on my email to support...

I heard from my friends, voice quaility also bad for the last few weeks.. (Atleast, personally, I had not felt that)...

I hv been using vonage for little more than 18 months, feel more professional, less problem with their ATA's... (With no way to customize... only remark)

[necrossis]

Unfortunately, that is the price you have to pay if you want to have control of your ATA and if you want the real value that the BV service has, compared to Vonage.

If you value customer support more than money, then you're choice is Vonage.
If you're on a budget then, personally, I think BV is a good value for your money.

I'm hoping that, as time passes, BV will improve their customer support. For now, I'll just have to deal with it.[/b]

[teardropglass]

I agree, I was with Vonage before, and they had great call quality (same as BV's), and they were ultra-reliable for connections (not like BV's). I dropped Vonage because BV offered an unlimited plan that had Europe included, and that's a great deal for me.

You get what you pay for. Stick with Vonage if you want near-perfect service, but I really like BV. I can customize a large number of things, such as dial plans, time zone settings, and BV offers more options via their web portal than does Vonage.

I am also hoping that BV improves. They have improved since I started in December 2004 quite a bit already, and the reliability has drastically improved. I'm just hoping BV gets:

1. a London server hooked up because Vonage already offers a London server (important for European customers).

2. to continue to better their customer service. Vonage's is very professional and provides a nice troubleshooting prompts, i.e., dial one if you don't get a dial tone, dial 2 if you're having problems with call quality. At present, one can hold for BV's customer service from 2 seconds to 45 minutes and provides no prompts for problems.

3. someone to update their web portal page when BV experiences outages. Vonage is very particular about updating every outage, voicemail issues, dialling issues, etc..

4. more codecs, vonage offers three, right now BV offers just 711u on all of their servers. The 711 is quite bandwidth hungry.

I also think that Vonage is 1000x better for the average user. If you are not a VoIP power user, BV is somewhat of a problem. When I was Vonage, the average user would never have to know what SIP servers were, Codecs, provisioning, preferencing sip servers, nor any of the other technical things that it seems important to know about with BV.

Cheers