Seems that each of the VoIP services had initial growing pains. Vonage is, for the most part, well past their own growing pains. I fully expected some hiccups with T-Mobile's service, since it IS new, and they have less control over the general environment than they're used to. Luckily (I guess), they have at least some experience with 3rd party ISP's and Linksys routers as part of their service model due to their UMA / Hotspot@Home service. But it seems that consistent provisioning for T-Mobile@Home VoIP is still challenging them more than anticipated.
T-Mobile customer care is clearly over-burdened right now. For the past 7 or 8 years, I enjoyed the best customer support available from a mobile phone company, with short wait times, polite and helpful customer care reps, and 24 x 7 availability. As T-Mobile rolls out new service offerings, it seems, though, that Customer Care lags in its ability to staff up and address the additional demands: no doubt there are a number of factors involved, but I must admit that I'm disappointed that a company that had been SO interested in providing top notch customer support seems to be slipping in planning and budgeting for the increased demand that will, inevitably, be part of a new service rollout - especially one that's so different from prior offerings for them and includes variables that are not under their direct control.
In general, despite the occasional glitches I experience, the number of outages I experience have dropped off since I first signed up the weekend they first released the service. There were several outages initially, then one in 2 or 3 weeks, and now very few. It's certainly not perfect yet, but *something* is going on to improve the service. It's usable now -- and very good when there are no problems. I believe they'll iron out the remaining issues in the not-too-distant-future. For me, the trade off is reasonable, and it seems worth hanging in there with them as they get the remaining bugs out. But time will tell: if there continue to be bugs a few months down the road, I'll reconsider. For now, though, I'm optimistic.
- Jon
