Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Volume 2, Number 26: Problems With ZingoTel

(Note: I originally posted this entry to my Yahoo! GeoCities blog in August 2007.)

Last September, I wrote a blog entry detailing how happy I was to never pay frigging AT&T $47/month for phone service that, at the time, I hardly ever used. I had discovered a low-cost Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) provider called ZingoTel. At that time, had been receiving mostly good reviews, and I was very happy with them for the first few months I had them.

But in March, I got a new job that enabled me to work at home, which led to much more phone usage, which meant more opportunites for any ZingoTel-related problems to rear their ugly heads. And rear their heads, they did.

In the last few months, I have had at least a dozen dropped calls. Also, earlier today, someone had to call me on my cell phone because when they tried to call me at home, they got a message saying that line was "out of service."

Also, over the course of the past seven months or so, almost every single review on ZingoTel posted on VOIP reporting web site voipreview.org has been negative. ZingoTel has been criticized for everything from crappy service to scamming its customers.

This litany of problems suggests that ZingoTel's own hardware and/or software is either unreliable or poorly maintained. That is simply unacceptable. I have set September 15 as my date for switching to another VOIP provider (the reason I cannot do so right now is that ZingoTel will slap me with a $40 "disconnection" fee if I cancel their service within the first year of service, which started in mid-September, 2006).

Bottom line: ZingoTel has become too unreliable for me to recommend to anyone.

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