VoIPo

A lot of people might be wondering why you need to use VOIP instead of a traditional landline. VOIP has become extremely popular, thanks to Skype, a service that lets you use your computer to talk to your friends over a broadband internet connection. Right now, most TV cable companies and phone companies offer VOIP handset deals. The reason why they are so popular is that in most places, the old phone company had always a monopoly on landlines. Calls between cities in the same country are considered long distance and don’t even start looking at international long-distance calls. The costs are pretty steep. But first of all, what is VOIP? VOIP stands for Voice Over Internet Protocol, a way to talk over the Internet.
Most people use VOIP as a bundled phone service through their cable provider. However many people are not aware that many companies provide a better feature set at a cheaper price! One such provider I used to run my business is VOIPo.com.
They offer many advanced features which many cable companies simply don’t offer at a fraction of the price. Here are some examples of how VOIPo makes me more productive every day:
-If I’m going to be out of the office with just a few keypad entries all my calls can follow me wherever I go.
-Thanks to custom caller ID if someone in my online address book calls me from their cell phone I don’t have to guess who the number belongs to.
-Some months I do a lot of remote support which has to be billed hourly or flat rate. With the call logs being conveniently logged in a control panel there is no need to watch a call timer.
-I use a service called YouMail which is voice mail on steroids; using VOIP’s call forwarding along with YouMail all my messages go to one unified mailbox. That is just my preference and VOIPo in itself has voice-mail that works very well.
-Choice of phones! Whether you want to use your existing phone system with the ATA they send you or want to use a softphone client on your PC, MAC, or smartphone devices one can answer calls where it is convenient for them. Personally, I use a Cisco 525G2 IP phone on my desk along with an ATA hooked up to a waterproof cordless phone.
-Sick of telemarketers and Robocalls? VOIPo has its own telemarketer block list and integrates with NoMoRobo so no longer will they interrupt your dinner.

The appeal of Voipo is the affordable service with a variety of features. But, the overall call quality seems inferior. Caller ID has never displayed the Caller, Date, and Time correctly on any of my residential phones. Although, this is a known problem for many customer accounts, they remain unable to address and resolve the matter. Dialing toll free numbers has inconsistent reliability; it only works sometimes depending on the number. The major issues are the Customer Service and Billing Practices. The customer service agents are friendly. However, they only have limited ability for assistance. The billing department is purely a back end operation. It is not possible to speak with an agent directly for billing issues. A support ticket is created for a later response. Customers are unaware that purchasing their service initiates an automated renewal process. Other major providers (Ex: Amazon, Norton, etc) expressly inform customers of automated renewal. This is not the case for Voipo. They remit an invoice 2 weeks prior to plan expiration, which does not mention their intention to process the fee. Then, they immediately charge the original credit card on file without consent. After the unauthorized charge has satisfied the upcoming renewal balance 14 days early, they will generate a new invoice and charge the card again a few hours later! This should never occur under any circumstance with a confirmed $0 balance on the account! It was grossly unnecessary, inappropriate, and deceptive. Moreover, their concerning billing practices fail to protect customer credit card accounts from misuse. I promptly contacted the merchant to file a fraud claim. I also notified Voipo of their duplicative charge to request a refund. Ultimately, they lack accountability, make excuses, and ignore their various system issues. Let the buyer beware.

I have had VOIPO for about 7 years now. I am still a customer. They were great in the beginning, but have gone down hill the past couple of years. Sometimes my phone doesn’t even work. I’ll have to reboot their supplied router and then it comes back up. For how long no one knows. Debating whether I want to renew for another 2 years.

As a FORMER long time customer, I gave chance after chance and beyond for many years to clean up their act. Reliability and support are beyond pathetic, so my advice is only consider use for a non-primary/cheap backup line or forwarding number as you may not be able to receive or make calls at any given point…
-support can take easily a hold of 20+ minutes to get someone during their advertised hours, nobody responds at times to online chat support from the web site during advertised hours, and then poor support on top of that!
-unreliable SIP server for BYOD devices (e.g. sip client on phone vs. supplied router)
-many events where the service is just completely down with no warnings and not acknowledging most downtimes
-Complete misrepresentation about free international calls for 60 min/month – undisclosed until signed up about severe restrictions to the list of countries plus specifics of carrier and/or type (mobile, landline, etc.) claiming it’s due to too much fraudulent calling
-totally botched data center move and lack of redundancy to have stable service – claim that things are fixed and stable that clearly never are and had to fight to get credit for non-working service for several months (e.g. no ring for incoming calls and straight to voicemail, fully down, can’t connect to supposedly “working” server(s), etc.)
-made it difficult to switch carriers on the way out claiming they have no control over porting out with nonsense that they don’t and can’t create a pin for it that many other phone providers require (repeatedly said for the new provider to put in 0000 or 1234 which clearly didn’t work in my case and finally I got them to create a pin after several interactions with “support”)
-denied my pro-rated refund when I left before end of term

I have had VOIPO for many years, however there has always been a problem calling another VOIPO customer, on average every 6 months tickets have to be opened because neither of us can call each other on our VOIPO numbers. The call simply fails to go through. And every time the troubleshooting is the same, reset the grandstream box, check the connections and then it goes to upper level support and they do something on their end and magically it starts working again for another couple months. Almost always calls will go through that are made from a landline or from another voice over IP carrier. I continue to believe its an issue with how voipo to voipo calls are being handled internally within VOIPO. It usually takes several days to get resolution and multiple email responses. They continue to insist that something is not connected but calls originating from outside the VOIPO network seem to go through most times. However recently even that has been working sporadically when we see this issue. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesnt. Note I have had very few problems calling and receiving calls originated from outside the VOIPO network. Im simply amazed that there is such an issue with VOIPO to VOIPO calls consistently.

AVOID VOIPO. I’ve been a customer for two years now, and another year back in 2011. In 2018 they moved their facilities (a week-long outage) and outsourced all of their support to India. The one time they answered the phone (I get hold music for hours at a time) it was a choppy, digital, unintelligible voice with an unintelligible accent. Online chat appears to have been abandoned as each attempt to chat will time out to a trouble-ticket screen. Replies to a trouble ticket is 24 hours, as they are at 2am US time. Replies are in broken, grammatically incorrect English. The ticket support staff is not trained to do much more than to tell you to restart the modem. I have had several outages more than a week long, as there is no longer viable technical support. The service itself is not the best either. Call are choppy and drop with anything less that 300 mbs internet service. The modem gets sick randomly and must be powerfailed, and you don’t know how many calls you’ve missed. I advise you to avoid Voipo.

I have been with VOIPO for about 6 years now ever since Sun Rocket folded up. The service used to be great and any issues you had, they went out of their way to resolve.
Well that all changed a few years ago as they got too big and needed to upgrade their servers. I was without service for months(hard to pinpoint exactly as its not often used). the only way I knew it was down was the once in a blue moon that I would call it and I would get a busy signal. Some times I could just unplug everything and plug it back in and it would work again, other times I had to call them and they would change setting on their equipment. During the outage, i had called several times, some times being on hold for almost a hour, only to have them say that the were experiencing network issues and that it should be resolved shortly. I finally decided to cancel my contract when i received an email from them saying i was expiring in a month when i really had a full year of service left. I had to call them and wait 45 minutes before getting an agent. then going thought the hassle of arguing with them as to when i paid and that it was for 2 years and not 1 year. after being put on hold several times, they finally admitted the mistake. I had been contemplating canceling my home service for years as it’s mostly robo calls. Well them trying to get me to pay in advance for a year was the straw that broke the camels back. i guess if you want a cheap unreliable service, these might be the guys for you. For me, they were a lot of headaches

We were with Voipo for 6 years and in fact just concluded our third 2 year contract. The only reason we changed service is because we do not wish any more long-term contracts. (Voipo requires signing up for 2 more years to get a good rate). However, although we changed providers, we thought their features were fantastic, the Vpanel was easy to use and the free international calling worked great. There were a few issues once in a while over the 6 years but the company was responsive in taking care of them. Bottom line – we were satisfied customers and would still be with them if we could have had the long-term rate on a month by month basis.

I signed up with Voipo in 2019. In early 2020 they had a lot of technical problems. However, my service was still functional for most of that time (unlike those who say they had no phone service for three months). Since then everything has been okay. They are very inexpensive, although they have warned that their rates must go up because of additional government fees. I don’t regret signing up with them.

RUN FAR AND FAST…
DO NOT make my mistake.
Since 2019 I have had over charges to my credit card during initial set up, reported more than 20 service outages, some taking up to a month of constant complaining to resolve. Hours of my time wasted going back and forth between my ISP and Voipo.
7/9/2021 I am once again without reliable service.
My longest span of time has been 133 days of working “service” the rest of my complaint tickets to Voipo are 1 – 3 months apart, some of those taking up to a month, of back and forth to resolve.
This company has offered NO compensation for what has accumulated to months without service, not to mention the added cost, of relying on a prepaid cellphone, when service fails.
This Company has been not only unreliable, but Fraudulent.
At this time I am collecting all of my outage data to calculate exactly how many days of service I have been robed. This information is going to be forwarded to my Attorney Generals office to register a formal complaint.
Voipo has taken several years of advanced payments, for a phone “service” that at its best has been spotty.