I'm not personally impacted in any way by the SunRocket debacle. And I won't be hurt when Vonage leaves customers flailing either (that's a prediction). But I will share the painful tribulations my friend Constance Reader is dealing with.

Things to not bode well for GlobalTouch/SIPTalk at all if their VP is on the phone and merely pissing off customers with incompetence behind him.

THE SIPTALK HONEYMOON IS OVER
Posted on August 8th, 2007 at 7:29 pm by Constance Reader

And I am considering divorce.

Last Saturday something extremely odd happened.  The Architect called my VoIP number and left a voicemail.  It connected perfectly fine.  And the voicemail notification with message file attached arrived in my email inbox, perfectly fine.

Except that the notification email came from SunRocket.  The service I ditched the day they shut down operations, July 17.  Not from GlobalTouch/SipTalk.  The service I ordered that same day.

I forwarded my VoIP phone to my cell on Saturday afternoon while I ran errands.  I called the VoIP number and heard my own voicemail greeting.  Not the greeting I recorded for SipTalk, but the greeting I recorded for SunRocket.

Later on that night The Architect called me on the VoIP and after about fifteen minutes, my voicemail greeting started playing.  It didn’t disconnect the call, Arch and I were able to talk over it.  A few minutes later, the voicemail menu recording started playing.  The call still didn’t disconnect, we talked over it.  So later that day I called GlobalTouch customer support.  And was kept on hold for 42 minutes.

I sent a very irate email to the customer support address and not long after I received a phone call from one Stephen Nelson, whom I would not find out until later is the VP of Support at GlobalTouch.  He spent half an hour on the phone with me investigating the problem and realized that my VoIP number which had been working perfectly well since I connected the adapter had never been ported over from SunRocket.  Because they forgot to send me a piece of paper to sign.  A piece of paper.  Their failure.

Nelson sent an email to his LNP requesting an expedited port-over of my number before SunRocket’s entire network goes dark on Friday.

On Monday afternoon I received my first GlobalTouch billing statement via email.  A few hours later, I received this from Nelson:

I’ve just received confirmation from my LNP administrator they aren’t expediting any porting request from SunRocket. We will attempt to get it moved ASAP for you but we can’t guarantee you will continue to have service during this transition. Once transferred to us your service will return to service with your old number.

Not that it isn’t possible to port over the number before SunRocket goes dark.  Not that they aren’t permitted to port over.  But they just refuse.  For lack of a fucking piece of paper.
I ordered service on July 17, the start-up charges of $71.93 cleared my bank account on July 19, the adapter arrived soon after and immediately upon connection I was able to make calls to and receive calls at the number I was assured would port over from SunRocket.  And they have the running, jumping and standing gall to refuse after they sent me my first bill.

Oh, it gets better.

The first billing statement email did not have the information but a link that was supposed to enter a .pdf file in a browser.  It didn’t open the link, it didn’t open anything, it just caused the beach ball of death to spin unendingly.  So I reply to the email and ask to receive my bill by a different means.  Again the reply comes from Nelson and he has altered preferences so that my billing statement will arrive via email with an attachment. All this personal assistance from the VP of Support who still can’t manage to convince his LNP group that a number that has already been switched over can’t be ported over without a piece of paper, regardless of the fact that the new customer who owns that number will lose service entirely when their former provider’s network ceases to exist in a few days.

You’d think they were AT&T with this sort of bullshit practice.