First impression not good

[jvosburgh]

I realize now that I should have waited to port my number for a few weeks. I did it right away because we make very few outgoing calls. Most are incoming calls. I did not want to advertise the temporary number to only have it change back in a short time. Anyway, I have learned my lesson now.

Now for an update. I receive my replacement unit on Wednesday. It was not the original model PAP2T, but a RT31P2. Plugged it in and it fired right up. After a couple of minutes I had a dial tone. All good? Well, not quite.

Testing outgoing call was flawless. Worked great. Incoming calls were a problem. After I answered the call, I would get a couple of seconds of silence, then a fast busy. This happened a few times, so I fired up online chat.

The support person was very helpful and fixed the problem in about 15 minutes. It seems my ISP, Time Warner Roadrunner, was blocking some of the default ports. We tested and everything worked fine. Problem solved? Well, not quite.

Thursday we did not make or receive any calls. Friday we received several calls while at work. One left a message on voice mail and all seemed good. Our son answered a call around 4:00PM and another one at 6:00PM, all still good.

Then at 7:15PM our other son called us. This time, a couple seconds of silence then a fast busy. He called again, same symptom. I called him back and everything was good.

Used online chat to talk with support. He found nothing unusual with the device settings. He had me download network_check.exe and run it. I looked at the resulting output file and it just did some pings and trace routes which all looked pretty good. Sent the file to support and am waiting a reply.

Just received another incoming call with no problems. It appears that the problem is intermittent. That may make it harder to resolve. Hopefully it's just more port blocking by the ISP that is causing the problem.

I am optimistic at this point. Just hope it doesn't take too long to resolve.

FYI in case anyone is going to ask the question. I plugged the device directly into my cable modem. None of my devices are in between that could be causing a problem.

Thanks for you comments and interest.

[usa2k]

Great report, and it sounds like progress. I expect that support will get those details worked out.

As a new VOIPo user, you would not know that outgoing calls on a temporary number, with some simple steps, could have sent the CID of the number yet to be ported. Of course that is a moot point now.

[Russell]

Great report, and it sounds like progress. I expect that support will get those details worked out.

As a new VOIPo user, you would not know that outgoing calls on a temporary number, with some simple steps, could have sent the CID of the number yet to be ported. Of course that is a moot point now.

And, another moot point ... and if your previous service offered call-forwarding you could forward that to your VOIPo temporary number. Bottom line (hopefully, it'll benefit others - and this is what we should tell our friends when recommending ANY VOIP provider). Use the phone for outgoing (setting caller ID like VOIPo lets you, if the provider has that feature) and forward incoming to the temporary number. If you cannot forward incoming, at least use the temporary number for family incoming calls (assuming you're not single). Make sure any kinks are worked out and you're happy with the service, before ordering your port.