Service is down

[christcorp]

ski; we've been in the voip world together for quite a number of years. I truly respect you; both personally and your technical input. I even consider you an "Online Friend". Whatever that means. LOL!!!

But lets be real here. It's not even just the money. Customers of ALL PROVIDERS go through the whole complaining process every time the provider has a glitch. Everything from complaining to wanting to know if there's a better provider out there to move to. It's gets VERY VERY FRUSTRATING! Especially considering that most of the people have no concept of perspective. Here is the perspective. Do whatever people want with it.

1. There's 8760 hours in a year. If the provider was down for 87.6 hours (3 days 15 hours NON-STOP); they'd still have an uptime rate of 99%
2. Those 87.6 hours of downtime is equal to 7.3 hours per month for 12 months.
3. For every 3 months that go by without an outage; in theory; the provider could be down for 24 hours and still maintain that 99% uptime rate.
4. VoipO; and probably the vast majority of voip providers don't come anywhere close to being down those types of numbers. Most, including VoipO, is probably closer to the 99.9% uptime rate.
5. Even at the highest month-to-month voip plan; the price is approximately 1/3 that of a POTS line. $20 vs $60 a month.
6. At the NORMAL type voip plans with specials; voip prices are closer to 1/4 of POTS. $15 vs $60.
7. Some people's expectations are very unrealistic. If a provider had a 99% uptime rate; meaning DOWN for a total of 87.6 hours, they would be one of the WORST voip providers available. And yet that's a 99% uptime rate. Complaining about BETTER than that is UNREALISTIC.

I will definitely try and "Cool my Jets"; but the vast majority of voip customers; of any provider; needs to put their voip usage, voip provider, price, and total down time into perspective and stop whining because the service went down for a couple of hours. Especially when it's a rare occasion and not the norm. later... mike....

[ptrowski]

aww shucks Mike, you will make a guy blush.
I understand 110% where you are coming from, and some of the guys made the point above. Would I ask for a refund on 2 hours out of a year so far? Not me personally, but it never hurts to ask for something.

Don't ask for something and you would never receive anything.

[scott2020]

I would never want a refund for any outage, and I love VOIPo's service and reliability. I have tried many providers and settled on VOIPo because of their support and reliability. I only wonder that if the entire VOIPo infrastructure goes down, are there other options besides "disconnect" messages or "number out of service" type of things. Maybe upstream carriers can do something with VOIPo or whatever. I doubt that the world will come to an end if a caller gets strange messages for a short time, at least it would not for me. I accept the general internet-based telephone risk in exchange for price savings and more features.

[caseydoug]

A refund doesn't make sense. But if my VoIP provider were out even one hour per month, I would switch (or my wife would switch ). A couple of dropped calls in a month, or a couple of times picking up the phone and having no dial tone would lead me to keep my POTS line, perhaps using VoIP as a second line only. This is interesting, because my cell phone service is no where near this good. Calls drop, or voice quality suffers, and we just grin and bear it. But with a home phone, we have gotten used to 99.999%.

I think the remarkable fact is that we HAVE dropped our POTS line, and use only VoIP in the home. And my wife still lives here.