[geeks] Voip options

[JP Hindin]

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011, Mouse wrote:
> >> I was wondering if I should respond to Dan, because the truth is
> >> we're moving away from the US residential market.
> > The above, however, is the point.  Rez VoIP support sucks eggs.
>
> Well, only sort of.  Clueless customer support is what sucks.
> Residential VoI (what it should be called [%]) support is problematic
> only to the extent that your customer base has significant numbers of
> the clueless.

Due to how highly automated our system as (as it was written to be... by
me), I run the company solely. I do all the billing, the customer support,
the server and equipment maintenance... and I wrote the entire software
suite.

As Sammy very succintly pointed out - I spend four-to-six hours of time
babying a customer through setting up equipment they don't understand, for
a technology they can't grasp, possibly on a computer they barely know how
to work, using an ISP that stinks and refuses to take responsibility for
their quality issues... And suddenly I'm in negative numbers. And since
these customers jump ship at the drop of a hat, I quite often collect
accounts where they may, or may not, have paid up - but it's still a loss
for us.

People like Vonage/MagicJack control this by trying to lock a customer
into compliant and known equipment, which would certainly be nice, but I
don't ascribe to this sort of behaviour, even if it would make my life
infinitely easier.

> Somehow, I doubt gsm is among them. :-)

Agreed. And I'm sure just as Olehphone (Sammy's company) would take him,
so would we. But, in general, it's nicer not to deal w/Rez.

> There might be a place for somehting like nosupportlinuxhosting.com but
> for VoI.

I've been pondering this also. There used to be a dialup ISP in NZ back in
the mid-to-late 90s called StripNet - all it provided was the phone
number, username and password. No support was provided at all.

I understand what you were getting at - but as I am the whole company,
including the support, I strongly disagree in my specific case. (And
before anyone asks, no, I don't know why the Pakistanis and Indians are
all dumb as a post. I have to assume it's not a genetic failure of IQ, but
simply my extremely, extremely bad luck).

 - JP