show 3 year trend : "great CS, great tech help, good call quality, value" : "your router can make or break your experience, see update 12/27" : "get it..especially while they are giving free year"
Only had the adapter one day so far, but going good so far. Will update when I have more talk time, but here's my experience so far.... Researched various providers for a few days during which I contacted VT a couple times by email (ticket) and once by phone. First email ticket was answered in just 4 minutes on a Sunday night. Second ticket took 4 hours. I did mark these as low priority. My phone call was answered in about 2 minutes. The responses were intelligent and the person on the phone could give real answers. I signed up for the service Friday morning 12/8 for the $199/year + free year, with activation/shipping total bill about $239. [update: On 12/16 I got billed for E911 fee and reg fee $2.50 addition/month.] I wasn't ready to trust to port my number yet, so I asked for a new number. They don't offer new numbers in my area, so I signed up for a number out of my area for now. I will be able to port my number for free later, then that will give me "local" service in my city. (note for VT...I initially wrote you off because your site said you don't offer service in my area, which is not true if I port my number.) Now I waited, apparently its taking a couple days to process orders because the free year is keeping them busy. On Monday 12/11 a friend wanted to sign up for viatalk and asked me for a referral. I didn't have my account processed yet, so I submitted a low priority ticket to ask if I could get my customer number to do a referral. Within 35 minutes I was completely setup and had a tracking number and did my referral. Now, I did notice a bug in the link for the tracking number, so I went direct to USPS to track. Not VT's fault, but USPS does not seem to tell you that they even received the package until it is delivered. While I was waiting, I logged into the account and setup a softphone to play with a little. I setup the xten x-lite phone a made a few test calls. Pretty good calls, but I was using beta software which had a mic gain problem. Received adapter Thursday 12/12. Plugged it in and nothing happened. Found out I had a bad port on my belkin f5d7230-4 router. Switched to a different port and lights came on but not the phone. Browsed to the PAP2 and found it was never configured. No problem, around midnight, I called tech support waited 3 minutes. Knowledgeable tech stepped me through the setup in a couple minutes and suddenly I had dialtone. I made some calls for a day now and so far so good. One call this evening had slight echo for the first few seconds, but then it disappeared. I have v3.1.9 in my PAP2T and there is a V5 available. Need to determine what has changed and if it is worth flashing. The tech said it will work fine with the standard firmware. Linksys does not say what the firmware changes. ratings: The website (4) is a bit weak, but adequate. More extensive descriptions of features would be nice. Perhaps all the features put into a pdf in a manual format would be helpful. Installation (5) even though I had to configure my pap2, it was easy and my having a bad router port is not their fault. Quality (4) I did have a brief echo, but it corrected itself unlike other voip calling cards and softphones I've used. I expect to bump it up after a little more testing. Reliability (4) Just trying to stay realistic that voip may never be perfect, but expect to bump it up after more testing. Tech Support (5) I have been amazed at the top notch help. Value (5) Price, features are great. update 12/18: increasing quality and reliability...while i am not saying it will be perfect, it has been great over the last few days. Had an issue with my cordless phone not ringing. Submitted a ticket and it was fixed by changing to trapezoid ringing. update 12/20: changed PAP2T firmware to 5.1.1 and now the original ring voltages work. Found outgoing voice breaking up during an extreme condition of doing a dslreports speedtest during a call. Clearly a router issue (not VT) and looking for a better router to eliminate this possibility. Started a separate thread to figure out what to get. update 12/27: Flashed my Belkin with dd-wrt firmware. The software QoS helped some with outgoing voice during speed tests, but bricked my router during a setting tweak. So I temporarily used a dlink DI-524 router that made viatalk completely unusable. Dlink would drop connections or reboot every few minutes. Used the dlink while waiting for a Zyxel X-550 router to be delivered ($30 after rebates-rebate until 12/31). Installed and configured Zyxel X-550, giving Viatalk adapter ip address a #1 priority. Ran dslreports speed tests during a phone call to my POTS. Only brief blips of breakup on the voice during the upload test. Blips so minor that it did not interfere with understanding words. As a double check, gave my pc top priority and then disabled QoS. Both cases, outgoing voice quality had long durations of silence during upload test. Restored viatalk to top priority and all is great!!! A little more testing time and I dump the POTS. update 12/29: faxed form to port my phone number. Bummer...fax had to retry several times to go through. Kept getting communication errors. Even got errors when turning off error correction. I was faxing thru VT line. Usable, but annoying. Sent faxes to other locations was much easier. Voice calls sounding good and staying connected---since replacing the router. update 1/11/07: I didn't have proper info on the port form and had to re-fax it last week. Got confirmation email saying port is processing and checked on the POTS website and found POTS scheduled disconnect for 1/24  Quality has remained great. I bumped up the website rating, since they more than make up for any weak website info by being able to ask questions quickly and directly with VT. Also, the CEO gives feedback on this forum and VT's own forum. If you have a quality issue, VT is quick to find a solution as evidenced on the forums. VT has so many features, I keep learning how to take more and more advantage of them. Faxing is still a bit weak. I have sent some 14400 baud faxes successfully, with error correction on. But, still have to expect retries. I just got a 5$ DSL filter to see if that helps. update 2/1/07: Porting my number completed last week. There were a few hours on the day of the port where my number was in transition and could not get calls on the porting number. Guess that is to be expected. Anyway, since then, service has been great. Think we had one call where the audio didn't start for a few seconds at the beginning of a call, and think we had made a call to a cell phone and didn't here the ring tone. Tried to duplicate these things, but worked each time. I have read that these are fixable by sending a ticket, but waiting to see if I can duplicate. Just starting to discover how to use all the features. I really like the custom caller-id so I can put names with cell phone numbers. Faxing going ok, but still inconsistent. The DSL filter I bought was broken, so didn't get to try that. I turned on FAX ECAN on the pap2t, which seemed to help. Also, forcing fax to 9600 helps some, although I sometimes think that since it takes longer to transfer, there is a larger possibility of taking a hit. Have used the service for hundreds of perfect calling minutes including calls to Africa. Don't notice any delay. Setting up distinctive ring to ring in morse code to identify the caller. update 2/9/07: Used VT for over 1300 minutes now and going great. Faxing now working very well. Changes needed were updated PAP2T firmware, setting FAX DISABLE ECAN to yes, lowering the in and out gain to -6dm, telling the fax to do 9600 baud. I did a bunch of test faxes at 9600. I have the VT voice mail send an SMS to my cell phone when there is a message. That way I can see who left the message and decide if I need to retrieve it. Update 2/28/07: Now over 2100 minutes of usage and still great. Normally can't tell a difference from POTS. Update 4/18/07: Have used over 4600 minutes on Viatalk and still great. I use the softphone on my PC when away from home and that works well also. Update 5/17/07: Still going great. I stand behind the statement, that your router makes or breaks your experience. I upgrade firmware on the router and didn't have all the settings right, and experienced a partial lockup in the router that blocked my internet and phone use. Anyway, I fixed the setting and rebooted the router and all is well. Update 7/16/2007 Now over 10,000 minutes of use since sign-up and still impressed. A call today went to voice mail when it shouldn't have, but that doesn't happen often. Now, the offer to signup is even better now that they give you 2 lines. I don't have that option. 
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