Vestalink Lowered Rates
Josephf:
Quote from: SteveInWA on February 02, 2015, 08:29:24 pm
That forum is chock full of gossip, uninformed speculation, and bad attitudes. There is absolutely, positively, nothing authoritative or worthwhile there, with regard to any business plans or motives by Google or Obihai.
You can get into another useless debate over the meaning of "supported" if you wish, but it's going nowhere.
In fairness, there's a lot of that on this forum as well. And that discussion thread of the meaning of "supported" on that other forum was started by the proprietor of VL.
ceg3:
For what it's worth, I just let the account expire as of today. I've owned that number since Google Voice's inception, but I have had a new GV number since last February and I'm going to depend on GV evolving to an even better service as time rolls on. I even have a small bundle of business cards Google sent to me with my GV number on it when I signed up all those years ago. I never handed out a single card. ;D Vestalink has a video on its blog that interestingly suggests that when Google mobile begins they will be forced to charge taxes for services, such as Google Voice.
bamaboy:
I have used Vestalink for nearly a year now. Only at the very beginning were there very, very few problems. It has worked reliably and I'm totally satisfied. Other household members never notice that they are really using VOIP. When Google "changed their policy" I decided to break away from Google and not depend on them for consistency. It seems like everything they do is "half-baked" or they change this or that frequently so that you wind up spending more time keeping up with small changes that leave you hanging unexpectedly, so it just wasn't worth it. The voice quality on Vestlink is just fantastic and their service is used in my house daily. I just disconnected GV by going into the online OBI110 module and erasing there, reset the device. Then, went into GV online, removed chat (unchecked). Rebooted computer the ran the Vestalink autosetup. It works fine. I like the fact that I can only receive calls from those in my "phonebook, if desired" and can mark spam there too. I've actually only contacted support about once and they responded very quickly. My 911 doesn't function properly, but I could with a little persistence fix that, just don't care about that function. Hope this helps someone.
SteveInWA:
Quote from: ceg3 on February 03, 2015, 11:30:02 am
Vestalink has a video on its blog that interestingly suggests that when Google mobile begins they will be forced to charge taxes for services, such as Google Voice.
Now, that's pretty amusing. This company is in trouble. The owner started the service, using an unauthorized name (if I recall, it was "OBiVoice"), when the initial announcement was made about Google restricting authorization to use GV. Their business model was built purely on capturing GV "refugees". Now that GV is no longer an issue, they've run into the classic problem: the initial appeal of their marketing model is gone. There is a fixed cost floor to offering VoIP service; it's ok to offer "loss leader" pricing initially, hoping to attract new customers, but you need to make a profit to continue operations over the long term, so, sooner or later, the prices need to rise.
Since SIP VoIP is a price-sensitive commodity, a price hike will drive away the customers who only care about price. If VL can't offer sufficiently reliable service with consistent call quality and up-time, they'll lose those customers, but any investment in service improvements will kill their slim profit margin.
So, what to do? Resort to FUD. Speculate on top of speculation, about a "Google mobile" service, official details of which are completely non-existent.
This should give pause to anyone considering paying in advance for service from Vestalink.
ceg3:
I have to say I was really surprised Vestalink made no attempt to retain my account as part of a retention policy and I barely used the service, making me a cheap customer. First, I was never notified that the increase from my original, "fixed" rate of 39.99 for unlimited that had gone up to 89.99 had gone back down to 39.99 in my billing portal. Secondly, when I received my email notification of my subscription ending there was no attempt to entice me to renew. Seems to me, if you are desperate for subscribers you would try a little harder.
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