Leaving ViaTalk

Aug 23, 2007 Published by Tony Primerano

I signed up with Packet 8 today and filled out the forms to port my number from ViaTalk. I'm going to miss all the cool web features that ViaTalk had but in the end they proved to be an unreliable service.

I can't comment on Packet 8's service since I don't have the equipment yet but I have heard good things about them. Also, Packet 8 has been around 20 years and they have several patents, so they will probably stay in business for a while. Did I mention they turned a profit last quarter?

So, what's wrong with ViaTalk?

  1. Voicemail was horrible. It must be running on an overworked windows box. It stops and starts during playback and the greeting is often choppy. I also found this to be the case with braincast. obviously the same system
  2. Incoming calls get sent to voicemail without ringing my phone about 10% of the time. Maybe there is something wrong in my SIP setup but 90% of the time incoming calls work fine.
  3. Call waiting stopped working after a few weeks. All incoming calls are sent to VM when I am on the line now.
  4. Management refuses to admit that they are having issues keeping up with the new subscribers. Brendan only posts on forums outside of the viatalk site forums (why address people you already have?) and on those forums he says they have plenty of capacity and the long wait times to support will be under control in days. I would rather hear that they are a bit overwhelmed and are bringing in hardware and resources to address the surge in membership. Transparency is key.

Warning for people using the viatalk voicemail rss feed. Don't post your link anywhere public since search engines will find it. Want to listen to ViaTalk customer's personal voice mails? Check this out.

These people must have posted their RSS link somewhere.

One final plug. If you sign up for Packet 8 use me as a referral. :-)

Referral Link

Disclosure.. I own EGHT (packet8 ) stock but I also own PRTL (lingo) and I went with SunRocket over both of them 2.5 years ago. yeah. i owned them 2.5 years ago too. VOIP was looking so promising. ;-)

  • A photo of Larry Larry says:
    2007-09-22 05:59:48 -0400

    Tony I am with you about how Viatalk service is unreliable. Thanks to you I was able to configure my Sunrocket gizmo it worked for 3 weeks until something was changed on the server. I now have Viatalk's phone adapter and it has never worked I have tried port forwarding, DMZ, static IP addresses etc. So I maybe with you to Packet 8 Thanks for you help, Larry St. Clair Shores, M

Site Pages