Hudson’s Rather Random Homepage

I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later, when I started to see the stylish little Vonage commercials on TV, the cute idiotic people passing up sports cars and hot supermodel girls, yet suddenly having the wit to even know what Vonage is and how great it is. (Obviously they have thus far displayed great power in making wise choices)

This always struck me as stupid, but perhaps laughably true if you look at it from an odd slant. Vonage has started to turn to shit and I can testify on it - I’ll just compare my experience with them now against my experiences with them in the past before they started dipping down into the toilet.

Before any naysayers, knowitols or intards start coming out saying I’m just some clueless curd on the intarnets with a keyboard full of foul misdirected hate, let me fill you in on a few facts before you read any further.

• One: I have been a Vonage customer since early 2002, (thats 6 years for those of you who can’t count)
• Two: I have done extensive research, application and development in the VOIP area all that time.
• Three: I have overseen the development of our own Vonage-like VOIP system, which has been in service for years and I am intimately familiar with the hardware, software, audio codec’s and technical terms being discussed. but I’ll keep things as ‘plain english’ as possible.
• Four: I’m probably smarter than you. :P No, this isn’t a challenge for you to prove it. I don’t care. No, seriously, I DON’T CARE.

Read on for the full story.

When I signed up to Vonage back in the stone age, it was a dream come true. I was moving around a lot, job to job, house to house, and I was seriously growing sick of dealing with the highway robbery that is the phone company with the expensive bills and the costs of jumping my service around. Never mind that the POTS (plain old telephone system) is a huge waste of money and seriously needs to be reworked.

Vonage was the key I was looking for, portable ATA lets me take my phone number anywhere I go. Online service lets me change and adjust my features without having to call in. The ATA was smart enough to find its way out of my iptables based network and the Cisco ATA 186 they sent me was a real trooper, it was stable, reliable and frankly had more brains than most network appliances I have seen to date for the price. (That still stands, too)

An ATA is a piece of hardware that converts VOIP (Voice Over IP) into POTS, which basically means it lets you plug a normal everyday phone into it the ATA, plug the ATA into a network, and you now have a VOIP phone. It contains a boot prom, a few audio processing units, a network chip, and some other nick nacks you don’t really need to know about for this rant.

It wasn’t long after I got this device that I started wanting to play with its virtual guts. The stock Cisco 186’s have a web-based interface you can log into, and can also be configured through touch tone codes as well. It took me about five seconds to figure out that this ATA wasn’t just plain stock stuff, It had a custom OS flashed on it that locked a lot of these features out from the end user. no big deal, I was still very happy with the service.

The way Vonage makes these work is really quite simple, it’s straight off the shelf fun. You plug the ATA into a network, it discovers your setup using some of Cisco’s more reliable tricks and standard DHCP. It then reaches out to some vonage.com address and goes to a TFTP server (think FTP, only simplified.) to grab its simple plain text boot config file, and in theory also grab rom updates (has never happened.) from a URI like blah.vonage.com/modeltype/phonenumber/somehashhere/filename.blah.

The clever part is that this file is what holds a lot of things, like say your ‘bandwidth saver’ setting which you do at your dashboard on vonage’s website, which just changes the value for the audio codec and which bitrate it should use for audio quality and bandwidth usage. It also assigns what PBX your box is going to talk to when it gets to that point, etc etc.

Pretty straight forward stuff, really. For years, this worked /great/, turn off the box, move it someplace, plug it back in, then off we go into phone land.

Now skipping the mumbo jumbo, we fast forward to the present, Jan 19th, 2007, mumble mumble PM.

I forgot to update my billing info when i stopped using my Bank of America card, oops. (Thats an entirely different rant..) so of course two months goes by, and then poof, away goes my phone service. Whoops! No big deal, log into my Vonage account, change my billing data, and wait the 24 hours for it to process. Easy as pie.

I get the notice and see the charge on my new card! Great, Now I go grab a phone to make a call an..Hmm, no dial tone. I hit the button on my ATA and dial in 80# to see if it even has an IP address, nope, strange.
So this leads to me taking it into my office, hooking it up to a hub, popping open wire shark and checking just WTF this trusty old brick is up to.

I sit and watch as it gets DHCP, goes through its discovery checks, finds the internet, and then goes to grab its TFTP boot config file from vonage.. Only to see the thing fail. Three attempts then fail, three attemps then fail. I’m not intimate with TFTP errors, so I look up what i saw. Basically I was getitng 404, config file not there, sucks to be you, goodbye!

At which point the ATA then dumps all its default options and releases its IP address. This is basically like trying to boot your computer with a blank hard disk. It will get so far before it just gives up.

Okay, well, obvious idea, I let my account expire, they lock out my ATA, I pay my account, something went poo and my config file never showed back up. The box is obviously doing what it should be doing, it’s behaving just like always, it’s just not getting the data it needs to function. Entirely on THEIR end.

So I figure, hey, last time I had to call them like 5 and a half years ago, the service was great, and they fixed my account right quick too! I’ll just give them a quick ring and have them give it a poke, get my account sorted and not have to talk with them again for another five years, can’t beat that.

Boy was I wrong. I spend over half an hour on hold, listening to the same fucking goddamn annoying recording on top of the same shitty ear-bleeding music telling me how easy it is to fix my Vonage phone service by simply rebooting the device and restarting my entire network. Yeah, no shit, really? Well gee thanks for telling me, once every thirty fucking seconds, I never would have figured that out! And the incessant, non stop reminders after that will make sure that I hear those idiotic instructions echoing in my brain until I DIE.

FUCK YOU RECORDING LADY!

But I digress..

Finally, after the polar ice caps melt, I get picked up by some painfuly obvious offshore non-American tech support choad who can barely speak my language, but somebody was real clever to give them training to talk with a fake American accent, like say, Texan , to try and cover up the fact THEY DON’T SPEAK A FUCKING WORD OF ENGLISH!

Digressing again..

After some very difficult language barriers getting my account info across to this guy, he completely ignores my explanation of the problem. I told him, hi, yes, billing, blah blah, paid, etc etc, ATA not working because it’s not getting its config from you guys, etc. which took me straight to ‘the script’..
[Translating into English]

• ‘Ah yes, yes..uh..did you try rebooting sir?’
  ‘Uh…yeah..obviously. Several times, it’s working fine, it’s just not working because-’
• ‘Ohkay sir. one moment *On hold while guy looks up his script*’
• ‘Okay sir, is the light on?’
• ‘Uhm…yeah, its on, it has a link, it has power, look man, i’m calling to report an issue with the server-’
• ‘Ohkay sir. one moment *On hold while guy looks up his script*’
• ‘For fucks sake..’
• ‘Okay sir, your box is bad.’
• ‘..exscuse me?’
• ‘I cannot log into the box-’ (my turn!)
• ‘Thats because I’m behind a firewall, look I just need you to look at-’
• ‘Oh, can you reboot your network please?’
• ‘Excuse me? Reboot my network? uh.. no, I’m sorry, my network is fine, people are using it, I’m in my office. The problem isn’t the network, I have been trying to tell you that-’
• ‘Ohkay sir. one moment *On hold while guy looks up his script*’
• ‘..sonova bitch.’
• ‘Sir I cannot log into your ATA, it has probably gone bad.’
• ‘……………………….uhm. Exscuse me? It’s fine, heck, it had service just two days ago. would you stop putting me on hold and listen to me for a moment? I’m quite aware of what the problem is, if you’d listen to me. When my billing expired, my ata’s config file on your servers went away, obviously. Now that config file is still missing and my ATA won’t work without it, thats what the problem is, I’v seen it with my own eyes,it’s working just fine, the problem is on your end.’
• ‘Well sir, the box is very old, its from 2003 (wrong date chum), electronics fail very often..’
• ‘Uhm.. no they don’t..let me guess, this is the part where you tell me i need to get one of the new ATA’s you guys have been pushing out to people this year because you are too stupid to fix this or don’t know what i’m talking about, right?’
• ‘*question dodge!* let me see if you are covered by a replacement plan..please hold. *on hold again*’
• ‘oh for the fuck of god..’
• ‘Well sir, we can send you one of our new models if you like–’
• ‘no, i don’t like. I’ve seen the new ATA’s you guys use, and frankly they are pieces of shit. They overheat, they have buggy software and are unreliable, they have crap audio quality. there is /nothing/ wrong with this ata, you are just a level one tech support idiot with a script to read, and since you can’t fix me on your script you just off and tell me I need new hardware? buddy, if I was your boss I’d FIRE you for that one. I’ve BUILT voice over IP networks,I know the guts of this stuff like my own pecker, and I’m telling you, your system isn’t doing something right. I did not spend 30 fucking minutes on hold to be more or less ignored by a half wit phone monkey and then told I have to replace my hardware with the latest piece of useless cheap shit!’
• ‘*dead silence*..I..uh..uh..’
• ‘yeah you heard me. fuck this. I’ll fix it myself or just get my number moved over to our network, thanks alot for being completely useless.’
• *click*

If you haven’t noticed, being given the idiot-script treatment and then basically cut off and ignored every time I try to say something important *really* pisses me off after a while. Look people, those of you out there, if anybody reads this and ever has the responsibility of setting up a call center, let me bestow upon you a few tiny pieces of advice that will stop countless people out there smarter than your minimum wage tech support goonies from getting ring-rage.

1. LISTEN TO THE FUCKING CUSTOMER.
2. STOP SHAFTING THE USERS PROBLEM BY THROWING CHEAPER, THROW-AWAY HARDWARE AT THEM, IT DOESN’T FIX THE REAL PROBLEM AS OFTEN AS YOU THINK.
3. IF THE LEVEL ONE GUY CAN’T SEEM TO FIX THE PROBLEM, ESCALATE THE CALL UP TO SOMEBODY WITH MORE BRAINS THAN A MONKEYS ASS WHO CAN DETERMINE IF THE BOX IS REALLY FRIED OR IF THE PROBLEM MIGHT *GASP* REALLY BE ON YOUR END! THIS HELPS ALERT YOU TO GLITCHES AND ISSUES IN YOUR SYSTEM!

Seriously, damn. If I took a call from one of our customers and handled it that poorly, I’d fire myself!
This kind of piss-poor end user support is a pretty clear sign of a company beginning to crumple under their own weight, a effect I often call the support whale. Either by too high call volume (indicating problematic service due to heavy load, perhaps overworked admin staff or systems, shoddy end user hardware, etc) or by very poor user support that really has no idea what they are doing, leaving problems un-fixed and costing the company countless dollars as they fling new hardware to users who quite possibly don’t need it.

This is a also possibly sign of a company who has been beating on their bottom line a little too hard and has basically sacrificed the satisfied customer (support) experience to make a bigger buck at the end of the fiscal - somebody has designed the support system to be as cheap and as fast as possible while dropping effectiveness, when blunt effectiveness would overshadow all other things, time, cost, customer satisfaction and less call-backs.

In my eye’s, such a sacrifice is completely intolerable. Never mind stupid, I’d hate to even guess how many dollars and customers have been wasted on problems like these, having clueless tech monkeys fling ATA’s left and right when they can’t fix the problem, and I can’t even guess how many people just up and leave now that many ISP’s and other companies like mine are offering VOIP services as well.

This is the kind of thing I see company’s do before they start to go south, I’ve worked for a few. Everything looks real good on paper, until you start screwing with the customers day and the customers start telling you to screw off.

On a side note. I *did* fix my phone. It was such a simple thing it startles me this guy on the phone didn’t even bother doing it or know about it. I logged into my ‘dashboard’ at Vonage and changed my phone settings around on my dashboard, the bandwidth saver and some other things, then changed them back. On the very next reboot the ATA found the file that was previously MIA, downloaded it, and trucked right along just fine, not a care in the world.

To quote myself: Broken box my ass. Fuck you.

Sooner or later, they will just drop support for my ATA of choice, and I’ll have to decide what to do after that. Either tolerate the less than grand new ones, or bother myself to have my number ported over to my own PBX and deal with it myself.

Then again, being able to blacklist numbers and play funny sound files to them instead of having them ring through, or change my caller ID to ‘SATAN IS CALLING’ could be fun..