I don’t think this blog is that popular by any stretch of the imagination…

Well the final notice arrived last week sometime. AT&T is pulling the plug on CallVantage come October 20, 2009. I’ve been a CallVantage customer for more than 3 years now and I’ve never (yes never) had an issue with the service.  And it’s saved me a ton of $$$$ with the wife making all those long distance calls that can go on for hours and hours. The voice quality was awesome and the feature set was superb. I’m very sad to see this service go, it was truly a winner if you ask me.

So now the search begins in earnest for a replacement (AT&T is advising all CV customers that wish to port their numbers to issue the request/order by September 29, 2009). There are quite a few other VoIP providers out there these days but where’s the gem in the rough? I haven’t decided myself but I’m curious if anyone out there has any opinions they’d like to share.

http://www.vonage.com/
http://www.voicepulse.com/
http://www.phonepower.com/services/voip/voiphome.aspx
http://www.itp4you.com/
http://www.voipo.com/
http://www.intalk.com/

The obvious option might be Vonage although I read a lot of bad stuff about their customer support, although is that just because of their sheer size?

I’ve got a lot of homework to do over the next week or so.

Cheers!

Update: August 11, 2008

After doing quite a bit of reading I went ahead and ordered service from VoicePulse. It’s amazing how many dreadful reviews of all the different VoIP service providers are out there. Then there are the supposedly independent review sites that are really just looking for a commission on the referral. It was very time consuming sifting through all the garbage in search of some honest non-biased reviews. In the end I decided to just try VoicePulse given it’s location, New Jersey, and  the age of the company itself – it’s been around for sometime now. I guess there’s quite a rush on since the Linksys ATA was on backorder at the time I placed my order. I just got an email from UPS that the adapter is scheduled to arrive tomorrow. I’ll be sure to post a full (honest) review when I have everything up and running.

Cheers!

There are obviously a lot of very knowledgeable people posting to this blog. While I think the material I’ve already posted is helpful I think there are a lot of other folks out there that could help. I’m currently contemplating starting a discussion forum (probably using phpBB) to help get these folks connected. While I recognize that there are quite a few existing discussion forums (Tek-Tips is one such forum) that provide a great environment I think a better job could be done to help nurture the participants and help keep the discussions on topic. I know that Nortel has some discussion forums of their own which are relatively new.

I get a LOT of personal email messages asking for help on various topics. While I try to respond to the vast majority of them I don’t always have the time (or energy). I’m thinking about the following forums;

• Nortel BayRS Routing
• Nortel Ethernet Switching
• Nortel Ethernet Routing Switching
• Nortel VPN Routing
• Nortel Succession 1000 Call Server
• Motorola Wireless LAN Switches
• Network Management

While it will probably mean some additional workload to get it up and running it could really help connect a lot of folks and could. I could also solicit a few experts to help moderate the different discussion forums and provide some high quality content.

Let me take a poll and see what you folks think. Please feel free to be brutally honest!

[poll id=”6″]

Cheers!