I have been using Voice Pulse for about 4 years now. When I signed up for VOIP my primary interest
was to save on my phone bill. Verizon
aka the ‘Billing machine’ had sent me a notice that due to the fact that I did
not make many long distance calls with them they were going to surcharge my
account. Yes I rolled my eyes on that sentence. Between all the bogus FCC and other taxes, I
had enough of their overpriced phone service.
So I pulled the trigger, visited one my favorite forum discussion
sites called DSLReports.com and read the experiences from other users. I went with a service called Voice Pulse
which back in the day worked and had good service. Well that was then and now it’s a whole different
story. About 18 months ago something changed
over at Voice Pulse. I have no idea what
but the service went downhill. First
they dropped their internal voice mail system and went with a 3rd
party called YouMail. You can probably
guess what happened, a finger pointing game when voice mail did not work
correctly. The MWI (message waiting indicator) was the main problem. Someone would leave you a voice mail and you
had no clue voice mail was sent. Well
many months (years) later it still does not work to any degree of
reliability. Next was the voice
quality. It was always good (not great)
but more than acceptable. Then Voice
Pulse did some sort of update which made my AT&T TL92328 cordless handsets a
door stop. Nobody could hear me, the
output was very soft. They worked fine
on any other VOIP / POTS service but not Voice Pulse. I had to buy all new handsets from Panasonic
to get my phone service back. (some
savings switching to VOIP!) Then my cell
phone minutes were on the rise because none of my friends could reach me on my
Voice Pulse number.
So months past, I opened several trouble tickets with
them. It became very clear they were a
9-5 shop. If something went down during
the evening hours it would be down until the next day. I was kinda shocked when they had a big
outage and had no idea for the whole evening.
You would think they would be monitoring major system outages 24/7.
Then the bizarre started, the phone would ring, you would
answer after the first ring and nobody was there and calls went directly to
voice mail. And of course with no surprise the MWI indicator was not working
again. Then I could not call any 800
service, my cell could call the same number but not Voice Pulse. So the end of the road came when mega storm
Sandy hit the east coast. I was not able
to make almost any call yet my cell phone could call the same numbers without
issue.
For anyone considering VOIP my experience is don’t port
your number on day one. After reading
many reviews / issues on the forums get a temporary DID number and carefully
test your selection. None of them are
perfect.
I will do a follow up with VOIP.ms which is my new VOIP
service. So far it works great.
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