Review by cabbey 
UPDATED: 1.7 years ago
member for 3 years, 162 visits, last login: 74 days ago
 Rochester,Olmsted,MN
 $23 per month
 about 8 days
 "better sound quality than vonage; better price than qwest/charter/att"
 "the website; occasional outages; customer support"
 "well worth the money; better than other VOIP providers; not ready for grandma yet"
| Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
|
Time with P8 at home: 17 months
Time watching P8 and using it at co-workers: 29 months
Plan: Freedom Unlimited
Cost: 23.48 / mon w/ taxes and fees and e911 service.
Average monthly minutes PSTN: 3000
Average monthly IP minutes: 15 (we simply don't know many people that we call regularly who are also packet 8 users... this might be better of the various VOIP providers would work together and make voip to voip calls pure voip instead of routing over the PSTN.)
Average outage (in the last 9 months or so*): 10 minutes
Mean Time Between Outages (in the last 9 months or so*): 8 weeks.
Connection to the net: business class cable, 5000K down, 1024K up.
(* of outages I've noticed, outages were more common and lasted longer before maybe a year ago)
I don't think I've ever had a call dropped once it was connected, all outages tend to be connecting outages, you get a dial tone, and dial out, but you never hear it ring or get any indication that it connected. On a few occasions I'm told that it did in fact ring, but that when they answered the phone they got silence.
While I run it over a 5/1 cable connection, one of my coworkers runs his over a much slower 1.5m/128k connection. It "works" so long as he's not trying to talk on the line and upload a file at the same time. A QoS filter at the firewall on our home network side of the cable connection seems to help that.
The single biggest draw back to packet 8 has in the past been their website, it was horid. The prime example being that if you brought up the account details you saw a half dozen values, and that was it. But if you clicked the edit button, then the listing expanded and you got a full list of a couple dozen values! They have rolled out a much better website, but it's still not the greatest. Their customer support however has long ago taken the place of their website as the single worst part of their service.
Aggregating the support calls between myself and a handful of my co-workers, I'd say generally we have found their support to be a crap shoot. Either you get someone that doesn't really get it, and doesn't really care... or you get someone that really knows what they're doing and cares a lot.
A good case in point, one of my co-workers was experiencing a really bad connection quality and emailed tech support about it. 20 minutes later they called him, on his voip line, and heard the quality issue for themselves, then called him on his alternate line (cell phone) to discuss how to fix the problem. it was a couple hours of back and forth phone calls over the course of an afternoon, but quite clearly the support personnel that were involved with that call *knew* what they were doing and had the right tools for the job. Conversely, I was having trouble with a specific section of the website with the safari browser and emailed them to let them know that one section wasn't showing up (error in the html left it rendered incorrectly)... the response email I got 3 days later was basically "the feature you are looking for, ____, can be found on our website by going to this URL, and clicking on the link labeled _____." along with all the usual form letter junk.
In the past few months they seem to have gone through another painfull growth cycle, wherein their customer service (which appears to have been largely outsourced to the cheapest overseas bidders) has really gone down hill. One of my co-workers is extremely upset with them about their billing him for two months service on a device he never activated while waiting for them to do a number portability request that they finally admitted they couldn't do.
Bottom line: From a technical perspective they seem to be an acceptable voip option at the moment, but they are a very young company, and seem to have gone through some serious growth pains on a regular basis. This is all very bleeding edge, and it's not ready for grandma yet... you need to be a bit of a hacker at heart to work with this.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Packet8 |
|
Packet8
(15)
(17)