July 2nd, 2008, 13 Comments »
Maybe it’s just been a bad week, but VOIP feels like a rare Concorde-esque backward step in technology. In the past week, I’ve had three separate conversations (all, coincidentally, with software startups) interrupted by lousy phone service. In each case, the person I was speaking to blamed their dodgy VOIP service.
We were reasonably happy with Skype (and SkypeOut) when living in Morocco and Malta (the Maltanet VOIP service was awful). Yet, counterintuitively, it’s been much more unreliable when making calls from BC. Maybe a busier network is to blame?
On the other hand, Shaw has provided the most reliable VOIP service I’ve ever used.
In short, making a phone call used to 100% reliable. Thanks to VOIP, we’re down to about 85%. What gives?
13 Comments »
July 2nd, 2007, 12 Comments »
This is a message for the folks at GrandCentral. I sent them an email, but I’ll bet they get a lot of email, so I figured I’d try a different route. The rest of you can move along.
Hi Grandcentralites,
I’m living in Malta for six months, but my wife and I are still using our Canadian cell phones. We’ve been waiting for GrandCentral’s service to come to Canada so that it can solve a couple of telephony problems for us, and save us some money.
I tried to access your service, but your site detected that I’m not in North America and gave me the cold shoulder. Can I get a hall pass to sign up for the service? I have a Canadian address and everything. Thanks, muchly.
Thanks to Sean for tipping me off that GrandCentral has come to the Great White North.
12 Comments »
May 16th, 2007, 8 Comments »
Among the sundry telephony options available to us for having conference calls with our clients back in North America, the best option has turned out to be SkypeOut. We wear headsets for the output, and use one of our Mac’s internal microphones for the input. Our 150-year-old limestone villa is kind of echoey, so we’ve started taking our meetings from the pool deck.
Mind you, it does get a little weird if the local basilica’s bells strike the hour. It just adds some charm to the conversation, I think.
We recently encountered a farcical situation when calling a client. They have a phone system that requires you to enter a three digit extension. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, you can’t do this using Skype.
I hastily surfed around the web, and discovered the DTMF Tone Generator applet. It’s very old school (compatible with “HotJava 1.1, Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0″), but it worked liked a charm. I just unplugged our headphones for a second and dialed the extension in the web page. The computer heard itself, and connected us to our client. We are l33t f0ne phr3aks.
8 Comments »
April 17th, 2007, 5 Comments »
You know, it’s striking how quickly a company can antagonize me. I called Vonage tonight, eager to sign up for their basic package, as part of our ongoing international phoning strategy.
All I wanted was a basic package, so that I could have their voicemail-to-email service. People call our mobile numbers in Vancouver, and the call gets forwarded to our Vonage number. They leave a voice mail message, and the message gets emailed to me. Simple, right?
Unfortunately, they won’t let me sign up for any Vonage service without also giving me some hardware. Some of the hardware is free, but I don’t want any of it. Vonage confirmed that I don’t need it for my particular problem.
Perversely, I want to cut them a deal, but they won’t take it. I want less from them (that is, no hardware), but I’m willing to pay the full price for the service. I spoke to two different agents, and neither could help me. I asked to talk to a manager, they put me on hold, and I got bounced to some French language telephone blackhole.
Adieu, Vonage, I hardly knew you. Bonjour Primus. I’ll call them tomorrow morning to see if they won’t send me hardware.
5 Comments »
