Message exchange with Blueface

molinaalexis

My phone is this morning as many times before, with a busy tone , while
the symbol of phone in the netgear is flashing in orange color, other
times while flashing I pick up the phone to hear a sound like a fax
message, your service is unreliable, is cheap in comparison with the
cable operators but unreliable.

People have told me that they receive a busy tone while calling me at a
time when I was not using the phone, and like this many other small
irregularities, that have attributed to what I WOULD CALL A BAD SERVICE

All this is happening while I have internet service, Cable, 10 Mbits/sec.

What can you do to eliminate forever these problems.

BLUEFACE ANSWER

If you require the same reliability as the PSTN then you will need to get an Eircom line.

With VoIP the technologies involved are a lot newer and more complex and things will go wrong. We do not offer any service guarantee due to this.

http://www.blueface.ie/corporate/termsofservice.aspx

We cannot eliminate these problems forever.

___

Thanks,
[MOD EDIT] Removed name

Blueface
Ireland's Broadband Phone Service

P: +353-1-436 1710
F: +353-1-443 0400

support@blueface.ie
www.blueface.ie

RangeR

Sorry Dude, but that's a fair response from Blueface. In that there are MANY factors that can affect you call quality. But if this is a consistant problem, then they or you may have a problem, rather than the many other things in the way.

Have you approached them before this email? I took your tone in the email to be that of a semi irate customer demanding a resolution.

Have you ever got in touch with them to ask them, nicely, are there any known issues at present, or can you help me with this.

Blueface are well known for their great technical knowledge and support. But sometimes there are just too many factors outside their control.

VoIP is just not ready for the mainstream yet.


*EDIT* it is also frowned upon to mention company employee names in postings like this. I would stretch to say that it goes against charter and could lead to a banning. I would suggest that you take his name out of your posting. Just to note, Email addresses and phone numbers can be posted if they are advertised by said company.

msmx5

Sounds like you, the end user, are experiencing a "bad service" all right. But, from personal experience, I think it is a bit premature to direct the blame at Blueface without first knowing what is the root cause (or causes) of your bad experiences.

Eircom are in full control of nearly all the infrastructure used to provide you with a traditional landline service so if Eircom were your provider and you experienced problems like you describe it would be a fair to criticise them for providing a bad service.

However in the VOIP world there are a lot more significant factors outside the control of your VOIP provider such as, for example: -
Your local internal network at your home/business.
Your ISP's network.
Your Internet usage characteristics
Internet usage characteristics of your neighbours.

I, as a Blueface customer, for one, have experienced similar problems to those you describe above and was considering cancelling my service at one point. However the more investigation I did into the problem the more I was able to identify that the problem was actually packet loss (and to a lesser extent latency on my NTL connection). The characteristics of this were variable, in that it was not present all the time so it was often hard to replicate the problem. I.e. if I had no dial tone from my Netgear, generally it was as a result of failed registration, clicking on the register button in the Netgear settings normally ended up in successful registration, which made it even more infuriating. Likewise I had some cases of people getting straight through to voicemail when I was not even on the phone.

I found one way of easily checking the quality of your broadband connection was to run the Blueface quality monitor software numerous times, and at different time of the day and preferably from a PC with little or no other s/w installed. I cut and pasted the results into a word file along with the time, date and any other notes I had on the state of the phone line at the time, it quickly became apparent that there were minor issues with packet loss more or less continuously and significant packet loss at peak internet usage times for "Home" users ... 7-11pm.

If it wasn't for the fact I've ported my landline number and therefore use VOIP for quite a lot of calls I would not have been aware of any issues with my NTL broadband connection. I had not noticed any deterioration in the data services and was getting very good and quite consistent throughput when downloading or uploading.

Most of these problems presented themselves to a degree before the NTL "speed upgrade" and to a much worse degree after the upgrade for a number of weeks. They have however completely disappeared over the last 4-6 weeks - results of the Blueface Quality Monitor confirm this and I can genuinely say that for my family the end user experience of VOIP with Blueface and NTL (in the last 4 weeks anyway) has been excellent.

I did try to get talking to NTL to see if they could fixt the problems I was having during April (when it was at its worst) but was not successful getting through to anyone with any appreciation for the problems I was describing/experiencing. I think it is more likely that planned upgrade of the NTL network resulted in my improved VOIP service rather than any complaints I made.

Blaster99

molinaalexis, try to establish with Blueface why you're getting a busy tone even though you're not using the phone. I've seen this happen too with other Blueface users I've called and I think they're using the Netgear box too.

The thing with VoIP is that you need to spend so much time troubleshooting problems that it's cheaper to use a normal landline when it's all said and done.

molinaalexis

Thanks to all for the explanations, I did contact after that email to someone at Bluface, and we did some changes, and so far so god, just 1 incident when the netgear phone symbol started to flash in orange color, when pick it up, there it was the sound like a fax communication. that was at 10 PM the 27 of July.

I will keep an eye on this, and take a log of things, then email them to them.

Thanks again.

paulm17781

molinaalexis wrote:

Thanks to all for the explanations, I did contact after that email to someone at Bluface, and we did some changes, and so far so god,

But you're still going to ensure that your first post says that their support is awful....