Today I spent 45 minutes on the phone trying to cancel my service. The reason for the time is that the CSR kept trying to tell me that I was going to have to pay $127.88 to cancel! Dude, you got to be kidding, right? Nope. Since my account was opened back in July, I was outside of my 30 day money back and my rebate fee deal which meant that I owed them a cancellation charge and the rebate for the now useless Motorola voip gateway.
I said that I had been a customer since April 05 and that my previous account had been closed by a CSR without my consent. I told him that Vonage FORCED me to open a new account. He asked for my previous account number and then eventually backed down and credited my account. He said anybody that has needed the “Executive Response Team” to resolve the issues is good enough justification to waive certain things. Wow…I’m really glad to be gone. If I’d been my Grandma and had not been so assertive on the fact that I was NOT going to pay anything, Vonage would have gotten $127.88.
Why did I cancel after spending so much time to get things straightened out? First, the only reason I was fighting Vonage so hard to keep my number was that it was a number I ported in from my local carrier, a metro number. For those that aren’t out in the sticks, it means that city folk can call me and it is a local call. So my number was important. Second, my number was already ported out to another provider and I was no longer a Vonage customer, in fact I haven’t been using Vonage since July. They have been my forwarding provider until the LNP was complete.
I’m now a customer of MyPhoneCompany.com I’m using their myDevice plan (which is only available from the FAQ section of their website) This plan allows me to do what I always wanted to do with Vonage: provision my own hardware. I plan on writing a post on how I configured my hardware where I purchased etc. in case you want to duplicate my setup.
