Vonage Glitch Knocks Out Service

from the ah,-that-glitch-again dept

Mon, Mar 7th 2005 12:55am — Mike Masnick

Just as we were saying that tech companies are too dismissive of problems by blaming all failures on a "glitch" along comes the news that about half of Vonage's customers lost service last week thanks to (you guessed it!) a "glitch". VoIP outages are unfortunately all to common these days, and that has some worried that VoIP is being oversold and is going to face a pretty serious backlash soon. That might not be true. So far, most of the stories about VoIP do make it pretty clear that you're sacrificing reliability. The VoIP providers themselves may want to be a bit more explicit about it -- but it seems like a lot of people signing up are pretty clear on the tradeoffs they're making to get VoIP.

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4 Comments

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dorpus, 7 Mar 2005 @ 12:58am

Is it so wrong to use msn messenger?
Free download, no funny 20-digit code numbers.
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Ron, 7 Mar 2005 @ 7:36am

should we be more dependant on the internet
This brings up the question: should everything on the planet be dependant on the internet?

It seems fine as long as things are working well, but it seems like everyone wants their eggs in this same basket, so when it does fail (yes, the web is known to have problems occasionally).....everyone screeches to a halt.
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DV Henkel-Wallace, 7 Mar 2005 @ 11:13am

Vonage has also been flakey in the past
I cancelled my vonage service because I had periods of unavailability that I could trace back to them, not my network. The VOIP providers are still in the "early adopter" phase.
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Tom Brown, 7 Mar 2005 @ 5:50pm

Vonage
Yeah; my service was intermittent last week. So what? I've got a cellphone too. I use Vonage just to cut my cellphone bill during peak hours.
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