Phonepower is terrible! Makes Obi unusable

[retiredrobb]

 I used my 202 with GV for over a year with few complaints from people on the other end of the line. After switching to Phonepower 2 weeks ago, EVERYONE complains I'm breaking up, warbly, or robotic, and  says "What?" over and over, so I have to use my pay per minute cell.
And no support from either company yet. Guess I'll sell my Obi and go with Ooma.

[AlanB]

I don't use PP, but they have generally been getting good reviews on call quality.

Before ditching your perfectly good Obi, do a factory reset and reprovision PP.

[jdubner]

My experience parallels that of retiredrobb -- occasional poor call quality since I switched to PP more than a month ago.

I opened a support ticket and there was an initial email response but then nothing.

[Hollywood]

I originally had Ooma which worked fine, but I was getting a LOT of telemarketer calls, so I switched to GoogleVoice. It too worked great. Since GV will no longer work with our OBI (mine is an OBI110), I switched to VIOPo. I now have the exact same complaints as the original poster. The "other party" complains my voice is breaking up. VOIPo customer support did a remote desktop connection and opened some ports on my modem/router. It didn't help.

I don't believe PhonePower or VOIPo have generally bad service or they wouldn't have any customers. I have Time/Warner internet with 15/1 mbps speed that worked with NetTalk, Ooma, and GoogleVoice/OBI110.

I'm at a loss as to where to look. Any ideas will be appreciated!

[jlynnwatts]

I found that I could only get Phone Power to work when I properly reset the Obi device. You might try following these steps...

1. De-couple sevice provider from SIP1 and SIP2 on the Obi100.
2. Delete the Obi100 from ObiTalk.
3. Using a paper clip, hold the reset for 15-20 seconds until you get a fast blinking green light and finally a red light to finalize the factory reset.
4. From ObiTalk, Add New Device.
5. Enter the "**5-xxxx" code from your phone handset to register the factory reset device with ObiTalk.
6. Step up PhonePower as the new provider on the Obi site.

(this is a modified sequence similar to the one that "BHochstrasser" gave us earlier on this forum)

After this reset was implemented, my Phone Power has seemed to work well for over a month. I added another account about 2 weeks ago for my wife in the same manner. It has also worked without problems.  We are both pleased with the quality of the Phone Power connection.

Hopefully this will help to clear up your connection with Phone Power.

JWatts

[retiredrobb]

I cycled power, but couldn't find any instructions on a factory reset (no improvement).

And 2 days ago they told me to do their speed tests and report back, which I did, and have heard nothing. I know my u/l speed isn't great at .3 to .6, and that's apparently the problem since I can hear the other person perfectly (3.1 d/l), and the jitter is about 40ms, but if GV works ok with that connection, why can't PP?

[retiredrobb]

My last reply was b4 jlynnwatts'. I'll try his idea.

[retiredrobb]

BTW, I had an Ooma too which worked fine on the same connection.

[retiredrobb]

Did the factory reset, etc. and the gf says no change. Thanks though.

[AlanB]

Thanks for reporting back.  It's always nice to get feedback when making a suggestion even if it doesn't work.  I unfortunately have no other suggestions.  I would suspect the going rate for Obi's on eBay will be rather low for the next few months.

[retiredrobb]

I hear ya. It's shame.
I'm planning on going cell only - republicwireless.com has unlimited talk/text for $10/mo.
Good reviews, and got my dtr on it a month ago and she's very happy with it.

[retiredrobb]

And oops, yeah Alan, it was your idea first, he just gave me the step by step.
Thanks for replying.

[BillyBobAtlantis]

Totally opposite experience here. 2 days ago (with GV's impending obsolescence on OBi202) I followed Obi's PhonePower "Learn More" link, and in a few moments completed the signup and configuration for 2 different accounts (one personal and one business) all for less than $100/year.  In only several minutes (perhaps 10 minutes) both newly chosen local PP-provided numbers were showing as configured in OBiTalk, and worked flawlessly without even a modem reset.  I was pleasantly surprised.  Then went into Google Voice and forwarded those two lines to their respective new (spoofed) PP lines, and then immediately had full service via PhonePower while using my original GV numbers.  Call quality appears identical to previous GV-OBi setup (my broadband is Charter Cable).
So far, totally happy camper.

[TonyTib]

Two things I've found that can help with choppy audio on the other side:
1.  Set the Obi's Ethernet port to always be 100Mbps (not 10/100) -- search the forums for how
2.  If PP supports G.729, try forcing the G.729 codec, which recovers quicker from trouble than G.711.  If you have high speed broadband, you shouldn't have this issue, but if you're on wireless (e.g. WiMax or LTE like me) or slow speed DSL this could be an issue

Best of luck!

P.S. I moved from Ooma to Obi, and one of the things I like better about Obi is that I can tweak it myself.

[retiredrobb]

After PP said it was my ISP, and I spent over an hour with a TW tech talking about reducing jitter to no avail, I got an email from PP with a link to a page on "how to set up my Asus router to work with PP".

Problem solved, but poorly.
My first inquiry to PP should have directed me to that page - I didn't find it cuz it's not even linked to from the support page.
Hours of frustration and time wasted because the first PP tech didn't suggest optimizing my router.

So now it's about as good as GV was.

[Harley]

About as good as google was, that's great, isn't it. I have found phonepower to be very helpful I had a problem with my phones and connection  and it was driving me nuts, guess what, it was my fault so don't blame anything on someone else before you make sure the fault wasn't your to start with, just saying. With PP you can at least chat and work with them on a problem and that's far more than can be said of other voip providers. There service and price is also pretty good and in fact excellent for me so far.

[awriter]

After switching to Phonepower 2 weeks ago, EVERYONE complains I'm breaking up, warbly, or robotic, and  says "What?" over and over, so I have to use my pay per minute cell.
And no support from either company yet.

Gotta say, my experience has been so good I don't miss the old GV at all. Before I deleted my Obi 100 device I followed the PP wiki and disabled a feature on the LAN menu of my router. [side note: the PP wiki lists advice for setting up most routers currently out there for use with PP].

I also wrote to Obi support and asked them to upgrade my firmware, which they did.

Then I followed PP's 'sync' instructions, was up and running in minutes, have had even better clarity than before, and two new perks: I now see the ID of my caller, not just their phone number -- and I no longer have that 15 second lag when I picked up the phone and had to say 'hello? hello? hello?' three times before my caller heard me.

Third perk: I have two GV numbers. I don't use the second one for anything but occasional incoming, so I logged into that account and forwarded that number to PP, too. Works like a charm.

Almost forgot: MAJOR perk #4 -- their Android app for my phone.  If I'm anywhere out w/wi-fi, I can use their app to call anyone without using cell phone minutes. And in the house, because you can make two concurrent calls, I really have two phones to use to call out at the same time, again without having to use up minutes. Seriously... what's not to like?

As to CS - wow! By phone or chat they are incredibly nice, professional and responsive. That means a lot to me, to have a human on the other end when I need it, and was the main reason I chose PP over Vestalink.

The only downside I've had is that despite getting a free DID from IPcomms with unlimited incoming, and despite spending 2 hours with IPcomms tech trying - we cannot figure out how to set up SP2 with the DID. We've gone the easy way and the manual way and each time it says 'configured' but NOT registered - and worse - SP1 (PP) then shows that stupid Red Error message. PP tech swears the problem isn't on their end, and for all I know the 100 can't handle it, but that's why I finally gave up and just forwarded the other GV number to my PP number.

But as far as I'm concerned, if PP keeps up the good work and doesn't raise prices, I'll be their customer for a long time.

[Echo]

I found that I could only get Phone Power to work when I properly reset the Obi device. You might try following these steps...

1. De-couple sevice provider from SIP1 and SIP2 on the Obi100.
2. Delete the Obi100 from ObiTalk.
3. Using a paper clip, hold the reset for 15-20 seconds until you get a fast blinking green light and finally a red light to finalize the factory reset.
4. From ObiTalk, Add New Device.
5. Enter the "**5-xxxx" code from your phone handset to register the factory reset device with ObiTalk.
6. Step up PhonePower as the new provider on the Obi site.

(this is a modified sequence similar to the one that "BHochstrasser" gave us earlier on this forum)

After this reset was implemented, my Phone Power has seemed to work well for over a month. I added another account about 2 weeks ago for my wife in the same manner. It has also worked without problems.  We are both pleased with the quality of the Phone Power connection.

My PP worked for awhile then wouldn't ring when I called it. After calling out, it would ring for a while then not. Same with power cycling, so I followed the above steps except didn't see out how to delete the device from Obitalk.

I re-subscribed to PP and it worked. Then I re-subscribed to voip.ms on SP2 and it worked but the PP stopped ringing flat. I went into expert mode and found some PP things that had v.ms data in them. One was InboundCallRoute data that was longer than its little window. When I scrolled out to the end, there was the v.ms account number. After I fixed that the next morning, both are working well.

So here's another thank you for the paper clip reset instructions. 

[zorlac]

"So here's another thank you for the paper clip reset instructions."

Doesn't  ***81 on the handset accomplish the same thing?