on 7/17/2007 I signed up italkbb's global monthly plan after a long deliberation. I think I own myself and people who are in search of a quality VOIP provider a balanced review of the service. To achieve this goal, I pledge NOT to solicit any referral from perspective readers. Someone has a similar blog at italkbbreview.blogspot.com, where the author continues to pump italkbb and ask for referrals, so I think it's time to have a balanced force.
I will write my reviews in 3 areas:
- Set up the service: signup and shipping
- Customer and Technical support
- Quality of Service: voice quality, features
I will rate each of the areas with a number between 0 and 5, where 0 means "horrid" and 5 "excellent."
First, my experience of setting up the service: 5- I signed up through italkbb's website: italkbb.com
- I received an confirmation email about an hour later on the same day.
- I received an email notifying me that the ATA was shipped a day later on 7/18/2007.
- On 7/20/2007 I received the package from UPS and plugged it with power and router and I got an immediate dail tone and I could make inbound and outbound calls.
Based on my experience, I would rate the sign-up/shipping a 5 since everything worked out smoothly and timely.
Customer and Technical support: 1/5
The final push for me to sign up the service is due to the recent implosion of SunRocket (SR henceforth), which has provided my phone service in the last two years. I really enjoyed their service, and it's a shame they went out business without warning.
On the second day (7/18/2007) I signed up italkbb, I filled out the line-port authorization form and faxed it along with my SunRocket's invoice to italkbb. Since the SR's service could be gone any time, I called italkbb's customer and tech support and inquired if they had received the fax. The CSRs were courteous, but none if them was helpful: no one knew where to find if the fax had been received. Instead, they suggested me to call back on the following day, which I did and nothing changed. Long story short, today is the 5th day after I faxed in the LNP form and I still have no knowledge if the form has been received, or italkbb has taken any action at all to port the number in.
On the second day after I signed up my service, italkbb started to run a promotion for former SR customers. I called in after I became aware of it and the CSR was again no help: sorry, Sir, there is nothing I can do since you are now our customer.
I had a problem where the China DID (basically an access number for people in China to call the italkbb number in US) did not work from a phone, and I called the tech support and was told that there would be no incoming calls within the first 24 hours. Immediately after I hang up, I called my friend in China and asked him to call me back, and it worked! So I think that the reason was the access number did not work in all areas or from all phones. But they could tell me this instead of "incoming call does not work within 24 hours."
So, I made 5 or 6 calls to the customer and tech support, every time with a problem to be solved and they score nil. I only gave them a 1 because CSRs are polite, albeit useless.
Quality of Service: Voice Quality and Features: 2.5/5
Being a SR's customer, I am sort of "spoiled:" SR did have occasional service outage, but I have absolutely no complaint about the voice quality and richness of features. I have used italkbb for 3 days and I rated them a 2.5 out of 5.
I have made about 200 minute calls since the service was activated. It has happened multiple times that a portion of the conversation was "chopped." The situation was deteriorated to the level where neither party could hear each other and we had to hang up and dial again. Even when it actually worked, the voice is often not natural (think of the sound made by a male duck).
As I mentioned earlier, the access DID in China does not always. I have a little sense of being cheated since this is their selling point: isn't it nice for your friends in HK, Taiwan and Mainland to call you at US for free? The fact is that it works for some phones, but not for others.
Compared to SR, the features of italkbb's service are quite limited. The following is a partial list of features I had with SR but missing in italkbb:
- No voicemail
- Cannot forward a voicemail for an email with the message as an attachment
- No free second line
- No distinctive ring (i.e., identify a caller by the ring)
- No SimRing (i.e., an income call rings multiple phones)
As you can tell, I am not entirely happy about italkbb's quality and features. The biggest disappoint for me is that the China DID does not always work. I have sent them an email to their tech support, but I am not holding my breath based on the experience in the past 3 days.
Overall, I rate the quality of service 2.5 out of 5.
If you are an italkbb customer, I hope you can leave a comment which will help others. If you are a perspective customer, I hope you find my blog useful.
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Update 1: On 7/23/2007, my LNP request showed up on the web portal. italkbb also sent me an acknowledgment email that the request has been received. Good communication!
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Update 2: On 7/30/2007, my LNP status changed to "ACCEPTED."
Hopefully the number port will be finished soon.
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Update 3: on 8/3/2007, LNP status changed to "accepted," whatever
it means.
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Update 4: on 8/9/2007, LNP status changed to "completed." Finally
I have cut all the ties with SunRocket.
While SR had its own shares of problems, I really miss some of the SR features: a customizable portal; voicemail and email/SMS notification of a voice message. When will italkBB provide such features?
