An Apology From VOIPO

[VOIPoTim]

When I founded VOIPO over 13 years ago, I set out to create a new kind of telephone company..not just from a technology standpoint, but also from a customer service standpoint.


Recently, we've had quite a few service issues come up intermittently that have caused issues with our service or various calling features for many of you. With any technology there will always be hiccups from time to time, but lately we've had more issues than usual and that's not acceptable.


First, I want to personally apologize for any inconvenience that the recent service issues or feature issues have caused you. We care about each and every one of you and appreciate your business very much.


Unlike many other phone companies, we are privately owned and I personally run the company. I've turned down many offers from other companies and investment firms that were interested in buying our company because I'm committed to continuing to innovate and provide a cost-effective, reliable, and feature-rich service.


I take service issues and outages very personally and sincerely want to apologize for the recent issues.


I also want to let you know what we're doing to make all of our services more reliable.


We are in the final phases of migrating key parts of our network to brand new hardware in a brand new state of the art IBM facility with state of the art network equipment that will improve connectivity.


We are doing this in phases to try to limit any issues and we're doing it at night in case any issues come up that cause temporarily service issues.


Tonight, we'll be starting a round of migrations at around 11PM Central Time and this may cause a short service interruption for some customers.


This has been a very complex migration, but we're almost done. We hope to have all equipment completely migrated over the next few days into the weekend and be very close back to normal next week.


Here are some things we are doing:




--Staff Changes--


We've made several changes with our team. We've rebuilt the team responsible for our infrastructure maintenance and keeping things up and running with some new people that are dedicated to keeping things reliable. As we've grown, our network has become more complex and our new hires will help make sure we're able to meet the needs of all customers.






--Datacenter Migration--


Our network is complex and many different servers have to work together for our service to work. Some of our core hardware is in an IBM owned datacenter that is now over 10 years old. While many of the servers have changed over time, we feel that the facility itself starting to have more network issues cropping up and have been considering migrating to one of the newer IBM facilities to see if that would improve connectivity.


It seems that we were moving in the right direction because IBM recently notified us that they were closing that facility down soon and requiring all customers to move to new hardware in one of their newer facilities. A move of this scale takes a lot of time and planning to get right and we were originally given a very unrealistic timeline for moving from IBM.


This caused us to scramble to start migrating to new equipment in the newer facility while facing a looming deadline. During this time, many issues cropped up and caused service issues since we were trying to complete the move in an unrealistic timeframe.


Once IBM realized the communication error, they notified all customers that they had made an error and extended the closing by a month. At that point though, we were already partially moved.


If we could go back in time, we would have moved to the new facility sooner, but taken more time to do the actual move.


We are now in the final phase of the migration and hope to have everything fully migrated over the next few days and through the weekend. We will try to minimize interruptions as much as possible as we know that reliable service is key, but we can't rule out the possibility that there will be small periods of issues.


Once we are fully migrated to the new facility, stability should go back to normal and we'll be focusing significant internal resources on keeping it that way.


While this year is ending on a challenging note as we work through these migrations and any issues that come up as a result of them, we know that we will get things back to normal. While our main focus at this time is on reliability, we have a busy 2020 planned with many enhancements that will be rolled out.




If you have issues with your service, please e-mail us at support@voipo.com and we'll be happy to help. In some cases, we may ask you to re-test issues if we make a change or if we think they were related to the migration because someone has likely changed since your last response. We appreciate your patience and understanding as we work through the extra load caused by the migrations.


Again, I sincerely apologize to all customers for all of this. I can assure you that we are doing everything we can to complete this migration and get services back to normal as quickly as possible. We really do appreciate your business and your trust in our service.


We are honored and excited to be your phone service provider of choice and look forward to serving you for years to come.






Best Regards,




Timothy Dick
Founder and CEO
VOIPO.com

[rcc344]

Tim,

I appreciate your correspondence concerning the issues with the VoIP telephone service. It is rare that a company accepts responsibility for problems.

I have been a subscriber since 2011 with current service until 2021. I'm currently not planning to renew.

The service interruptions lately have caused much consternation. While you state that the issue is being addressed, what assurance is there that enough resources can be placed in the system to alleviate the problems? The very numerous "limited time" offers further indicate a situation where there may be a cash flow problem. These offers were only seen once a year in the past.

I really hope that you can turn this around and make a bright future for VoIPO. I'll wait on renewal until I see that the service issue are resolved. As of today I'm still seeing server disconnect issues where I am registered but can't receive or make calls. No dial tone.

[dvijen]

I feel the same as rcc344. I have been with voipo since they started in beta stage. Even participated in beta testing of service. I have been out for one week now. No improvement after several complaints. Getting fed up. Too bad I am paid up until 12/2011.

[sommerfeld]

Most specific statement about what does & doesn't work appears to be here (4-tweet thread):

https://twitter.com/VOIPO/status/1199807328075186176

Notably:

Below are the services that we are still working to resolve:

-BYOD

-Outgoing Fax

-International Calling

-SMS

-Cloud

As of yesterday, BYOD wasn't working for me.

[JoelGNYC]

I'm also beyond fed up with the sheer negligence, seeing my service down yet again today on the supplied device, and still no word on service credits after over a month of going through this. Too little too late imho; I'm reporting to the FCC at this point and hope to be in contact with Tim or someone in senior management for arrangements to develop an exit plan and get a refund for the over 2 years pre-paid due to non-stop issues.