smartone86's Full Review: 8x8 DTA-310 IP Video Phone
My sob story begins in August 2007 when my beloved Sunrocket phone company went out of business unexpectedly. Sunrocket introduced my family to the world of VOIP and changed the way we communicated.
Left with no phone service upon their sudden closure, we were forced to make a decision as to a new company quickly. We arrived at Packet8 because it seemed similar to Sunrocket with cheap prices- $199 for unlimited calling in the US for the year.
Sign up was easy...too easy. We just had to fill out a form online.
They shipped us their router quickly too, and transferred our number quickly as well.
Then the fun began. Just plug in everything according to the diagram and go, right?
Not so fast there homie-g.
Plug in. Check diagram. Ok, it's correct. Listen for dial tone. Dial tone? Uh oh...what dial tone?
Use numerous cell phone minutes to talk to tech support.
Actually, don't even go there yet. First use 45 cell-phone minutes to hold for tech support. Then you can talk to them. But they won't help you anyways. They'll transfer you though. Hold again for 45 minutes, rinse and repeat times three.
They ended up determining our problem was not their fault, and I should talk to our internet service provider.
So, despite being thoroughly convinced the problem had nothing to do with Verizon (our internet worked fine) we gave them a call. The Verizon rep was helpful, but couldn't resolve the problem.
So we called 8x8 and started that fun process again.
After calling 5+ times a day for 3 days, we finally got a rep to replace out router. This is TWO WEEKS after we signed up for their service, and we haven't gotten so much as a dial tone. We were on hold a ton each time we called, but we blamed it on the influx of new customers due to Sunrocket's closing, and excused it.
The new router took another week to get there.
So, 3 weeks into having this service we're up and running. Honestly, that nightmare should have been our first clue. But we didn't, and we pressed on in our hell march.
We finally got up and running, and it was good. Well, at least decent. For awhile.
Then we started getting calls dropped. And outages, and static on the lines, and random weird problems.
This happened probably 3 days out of the week. Often times we couldn't make or receive calls, or do either.
We dealt with this for awhile, then after a 3 days spurt of nothing, we called customer support. Again, hours of cell phone minutes used up. They had us install a software update. Ok, done.
The phones worked again- for then.
About a week later the phones started acting up.
I'm a college student and live on campus. This morning I suddenly started getting my family's phone calls on my cell phone. Apparently, my cell phone was the secondary number for our account, and since our home phones weren't working, we started getting all the calls on my cell phone.
Dad calls tech support. They're worthless, as usual. We kept track. My father was on hold for a total of 3 hours, and talked to 7 different people. They told us our internet service was the problem. It was incompatible. Since we have no intentions of changing our internet service, dad told them he wants to cancel. "You can't," was their answer. Apparently we only had 30 days to cancel. Remember, our phone didn't work for 3 weeks of those 30 days.
So, in summary, they couldn't fix our phone, nor would they give us our money back.
Doing a google search, this appears to be a common problem.
After threats of legal action, we finally got our money back, but we are left, once again, without a phone service, and we are unsure if we will be able to get our phone number transferred to another service.
8x8 monthly service plan + Aastra IP phone = Great business phone solution! Enterprise-class calling features such as Auto-Attendant, Music on Hold, V...More at Staples
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