I really don't find all this trashing of BV on this discussion very fair.
1) They are a big commercial service, great 'unlimited' packages, most credible competitor to Vonage. The in-state-unlimited is a great POTS-replacement deal. 2) Unlike Vonage, they play along with Asterisk and other soft clients at no extra charge, even fixing some retry-bugs in the asterisk SIP channel module. Both 'Olle' patches work fine for me.
I run asterisk on a NATed LAN, connecting to numerous providers (sipgate, stanaphone, FWD, Broadvoice, voipjet, simpletelecom, gafachi, .....) plus several * sites I run for my (non-telecom) employer around the world. They all have their pluses & minuses.
BV's big minus to me has been their customer service, and their website. They recently really improved the website, no longer requiring the use of some satanic Java/activeX horror just to review your account.
The customer service needs a major upgrade at BV. I had a problem related to a number change I requested. This number change triggered a (silent) change to the SIP secret on my account, which the service rep could not detect. After 3 days of calls and emails (Mostly ignored) I reached the manager of the operation, who was really nice and injected a new, working SIP secret in their system, the whole thing took 30 seconds.
This comes down to further required work on their customer-handling backend stuff. Any account changes should trigger an email with the new setup parameters. These setup parameters should be accessible on the website! (as all of the above-named competitors do!). If this were done properly, I would have saved a lot of my time and aggravation, and would have consumed NO expensive human-time on their end.
You have to call or write (I did better with calling) to get your password from customer service, and the answer you get may not be correct! I think this is the result of a (flawed) policy to keep most of the turnkey customers from playing with SIP hardware configurations.
I was within a millimeter of dropping the service this week, but after persisting, I reached two really nice customer-service guys on the phone, who for now convinced me (not via marketing blah, but their helpful attitude) to hang on.
On Sat, 20 Nov 2004, Kannaiyan Natesan wrote:
A complete rubbish service in the whole world, which is spoiling the asterisk mailing list.
_______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
