VoIP review: SunRocket

I've been interested in SunRocket too, and I like their flyers! But I've been using the Canadian-based Vbuzzer service for a few months with very good results: we even use it for recording phone conferences and it works great. Even better? It's $10/month for unlimited US and Canadian calling, so it's even cheaper than SunRocket (and you don't have to pay for a year in advance).

I've been using SunRocket for almost a year now and I have been very pleased. The greatest thing about sunrocket for me is that they are upfront with their billing and pricing. When they said $199 for a year, it was exactly that, no activation fees or extra taxes. Its nice to have a company that plays fair.

Also, the call quality has been great and the added features that you get online are really useful (like listening to voicemail or forwarding calls to anywhere you are). I couldn't really be any happier...

I have been using sunrocket for about three months and although i had some initial problems with setup the tech support finally came through. Since then the only problem I had was my cable stopped working hence i lost service for three days. Overall the service is excellent and no way would I change back to quest.

I really wanted this to work but have had a bad experience with SunRocket. First I spent about 6 hours trying to set this up with two calls to their service dept. I finally went to bed and was surprised to see it working the next morning. Unfortunately my computers hooked to the router wouldn`t work. I finally on my own got both phone and computers working by hooking the phone up after the router instead of between the modem and router (an allternate setup shown in the manual). Of late my server has been dropping the IP and each time it does this, I lose my voip also. I have varying problems regaining my IP but am always able to re-establish the internet connection for the computers. Getting back the VOIP after these outages is such a hassel with the SunRocket service that I just can`t live with it anymore. I`m shipping the thing back mostly because of their inability to solve this problem in a timely manner. There is also one other problem which they will have to correct before I will consider using SR again. This is the problem with overseas voice quality. I made calls to Australia and Brazil. Both calls had severe clipping of the words so much so that it was difficult to carry on a conversation. I mentioned this to one of the service techies who said it was a known problem they were working on. When asked when they might have it corrected, he just laughed. There is alot good to say about SR but these items make it unuseable for me. I hope they can get their act together and I can give it another try.

I would not recommend Sunrocket or any other IP for those with DSL. DSL is simply too slow to handle someone using SR and somone using the computer. Even with my cable modem, I can get sound quality issues when someone is downloading on another computer. SR is a very good deal. The only problems I've had when calling overseas is a 15 to 20 second pause before the call connects. It took me a while to discover this.

SunRocket is the worst service I've ever seen. The customer service is worthless. Here's why: I was told it would take 10 day to e=receive incoming calls. I waited nearly 1 month--still no inbound calls. I would not recommend this service to anyone. You get what you pay for. I signed up with Vonage and so far so good, it's a little more expensive, but it works and is reliable.

I've used SR for about 8 months and have been very satisfied. My experiences with customer service have been good and set up was simple. It takes a while to get calls from your old phone number because I think they try to time the switch with the end of the billing period/month. Seems silly especially with 1-time fee. The clarity is equal to conventional phone. The only exception is when a large amount of bandwidth is used for downloads. I have convinced relatives to switch and all have thanked me and are happy.

I've been using Sun Rocket for one month now and must say it is great! It took about 14 full days to recieve it, but once it was here I plugged it all in, waited about a minute and made a phone call. The phones they gave me for free with it are valued at $50 at Walmart and so far there was only one phone call that had any interferance. I give Sun Rocket 9/10 stars.

I have had Sunrocket for less than a week. The customer service from SBC had gotten so poor, that I finally decided that I could no longer, in good conscience continue to give them my business. Nothing could be worse than than SBC, so I decided to give SR a try. Well guess what?! I was wrong! SR's customer service was horrific! It took about a week to get the gizmo in the mail, even though the billing starts when you sign up. When I got it in the mail, I hooked it up right away, using the alternative configuration of placing the gizmo AFTER the router. The phone service worked right away, and the "FREE PHONE" was nice. Unfortunately, I had a promo code for TWO phones, not the one that comes standard and getting them to send me the second phone was a big hassle. (I still haven't received it yet). The distinctive ring feature does not work like it is supposed to, and the wait time for customer service is minimum 15 minutes each time you call. Most times, I end up getting "disconnected" from the agent (accidentally? I'm not sure) and they are the rudest people ever. They must be in New Jersey because they talk to you like they are doing you a favor by taking your call. I am still waiting for someone from the engineering dept to call me back to see if they can resolve my distinctive ring issue. The voicemail and integrated web features are great, unlike anything available with traditional phone companies. If they could just get there stuff together and have a "customer service" attitude, they would have great potential. I'm giving them one more week to turn the situation around before I send back all the equipment and cancel. Sending everything back was actually the reccommendation from the last rep I spoke to. Can you believe that?

I have had SunRocket for nearly a year myself and have never had a bad Customer Support experience. I had some setup questions which were answered and have called to find out more info about referrals and other rates when I recommended the service to my friends.

I am extremely happy with my decision because I have saved hundreds of dollars and have more to show for it. I have been able to talk with friends abroad more often than ever before. The website is fantastic with features that allow you to get call information, voicemail, and other features from abroad. Its worth keeping an eye on for sure, and to me, a great technology to try and see if it works for you.

First of all, Sunrocket is great. It takes a bit of time to get incoming calls because of their more accurate way of supporting e 911. With their quasi pre-assigned numbers from their backbone provider it takes a bit longer. Frustrating but in the long run a better solution. PLUS they have an excellent lifeline feature on the TA that will place a call on a regular wired line if your Broadband access is out... very nice. Call quality is great and of course you can't beat the price.

As far as customer care is concerned hey they're still growing. So for the price patience is in order. But have you called Verizon lately with a problem... bad stuff that is and they have had 100 years to get it right!

Highly recommended!

I've had SunRocket for almost a year now and let me tell you the service sticks. Customer service is also bad, it take for EVER to get someone. DO NOT GET SUNROCKET!

I just got SR a week ago. Everything has been flawless. The package got to me in like 4 days. Took secs to hook up. I was able to recieve calls immediately. Voice quality has been good. I tested out listening to voicemails online and that worked out well too. I'm also getting voice mail notifications sent to my cell phone. I'm happy with that too. I already have 3 other families ready to switch over. So far so good. And I have high speed cable internet. No complaints. I'm waiting and watching....

I signed up after a friend of mine showed me his SunRocket setup when he first got it. I was impressed that he got the service, 2 free cordless phones, and the hardware for such a low rate. We tested out the quality together and I couldn't really find a reason not to try it out and have been pleased ever since.

I am trying it for last few weeks with many problems. Customer service is really bad or none. No reply after many e-mails or phone calls.
Having all kind of problems getting voice mails or other services where you have to enter numbers, it dose not recognize that - like Pin# or account #.
I wonder if it is hardware problem or anything else. Since I cant get any help from sunrocket, I am thinking about canceling the service, even though price is right - only 199!

I've had SR for about 10 days now. Overall I'm happy. I have one recurring problem with not being able to hear the other side of the call on certain numbers. Unfortunately, SR support is well below average and I haven't found a solution to the problem. I wouldn't mind the problems as much if I got a sense of progress from SR support. Since the price is so low, I'm sticking with them a bit longer in the hopes I can find a resolution.

I've switched completely over to using sunrocket because it has been very reliable and a lot more feature rich than my previous provider. I decided to place the gizmo behind my router which has helped me to maximize my internet connection while kepping call quality high. Great service.

SUNROCKET is bad service. BEWARE!!

Been using Sunrocket since December 2005 so far no mayor complaints still works fine. I would recommend people to give it a try.

15 days into Sunrocket. Pre sales support is great. After sales support sucks. Voice quality is OK. Verizon terminated my land line today and Sunrocket tells me it will be two day before they can complete their end of the transfer. After sales support is deligated to offshore phone support with no technical ability. They simply read from a script and can not answer any question not in the script.

I have had SR since January 4, 2006. It
seems too good to be true and it almost is
is. I was to have 3 different phone
nos. and as of March 9, only one has
been transferred. Good grief! Customer
service is via e-mail or via the
Philippines-based call center. They are
nice enough but no effective follow
thru to get the problem fixed. Right
now I give them 5 out of 10 score w/
customer service being 1 and their
gizmo and price being a 10.

I've had sunrocket for 5 months now. It's great! I highly recommend it.

Hi.

I have been trying to cancel sunrocket for the last ONE MONTH now, they keep telling me they will call me back and they never do. They dont reply to emails tell me to call the phone.

The waiting time on the phone for billing services is more than an hour IF YOU GET through. Other times the call just drops.

The Tech at the other end simply refuses to help you out, and tells you he will call you back which is total bull. I have been billed again, when i was told i would not be on the phone and there is just NO WAY AT ALL to contact ANYONE to cancel my account.

If you are a customer having problems cancelling your account, i recommend you directly call the bank and chargeback. Sunrocket is absolute nightmare to cancel.

All thier support is outsourced, who cannot even answer ANYTHING. They NEVER let you talk to a superior UNLESS you threaten them action.

This is bogus. If this keeps on going. I am going to court.

Thanks.

I Agree 100% with Megan above. Their customer support is terrible. I have been dealing with a technical issue (my transfered number does not work at all) for weeks! Each time I call, they tell me they are working the issue. I got fed up and asked to speak to a manager. He promised me he would call me back, and never did. When I called him back, I was told he was in a meeting and would call me as soon as he got out. He never did, and when I called back again, I was told that it was his day off. How could he be on his day off AND in a meeting at the same time. The second manager I spoke with said he could call me back. Of course, he did not. My issue is still not resolved. They have a great price, but as a company I do not trust them at all. And now that I read how hard it is to cancel, I am even more worried. Who knows what they will do with my credit card number. I would caution people AGAINST using sunrocket despite their price. The company seems dishonest. Not someone you would want with your credit card information.

I have been with SunRocket almost a year. The sound quality is not very good and I get dropped calls and unable to call out at times. If things don't get better soon I may look at alternatives even at a higher price.

I work for a large carrier for VOIP services so I have the benefit of testing multiple providers at once. I have to say without a doubt SunRocket has huge issues across the board. I am currenty running a VOX phone and SunRocket and the VOX has never experienced problems. SunRocket has one way audio, calls not completing, voice jitter, and very poor customer service. The VOX phone is on the same cable modem and never skips a beat. As much as SunRocket trys to blame their underlying carriers they don't have a leg to stand on. The worst voice service is from one SunRocket customer to another which if you know call flows this will not hit an underlying carrier! My rating is a DO NOT BUY.

Sent to: builditbetter@sunrocket.com on 03.15.2006:
-----
I am writing this in a last-ditch attempt to salvage my Sun Rocket service. We have had a very poor experience so far with Sun Rocket and after one and a half months we are still not completely setup. We have had nothing but problems so far and if our remaining issue is not resolved very quickly we will be leaving for another provider.

The details:
We signed up for service at the end of January 2006. We received the Gizmo, set it up, and we were immediately able to call outbound on the Sun Rocket line and the quality was acceptable.

The sunrocket.com website says 10 days until inbound calls should work and 30 days to port over any numbers from another provider (as I understand it, no other VOIP provider has this 10 day lag). While I was waiting the 10 days to get inbound calling, I initiated the process of porting my existing POTS line over to Sun Rocket (figuring that if we had full inbound/outbound calling on the Sun Rocket lines in 10 days and our existing number would take 30 days we would have 20 days to evaluate the service before we lost our existing number).

We could have accepted it if it only took 10 days to receive inbound calls, but it did not. I believe it was on the 11th day that I called customer support to make sure we were still slated to receive inbound calls at some point and I was told that it was 10 to 12 business days.

I then waited until after 12 business days and called back and they said that the Engineers had told them it would be more like 15 business days as they were backed up.

I waited 16 business days and as we still did not have inbound service I called back for the 3rd time and was told that since we didn't sign up for service until February 7th (not true - that was when I initiated the port of our POTS number) it would be another couple days yet.

We had been told that our existing POTS line would be transferred on March 7th. On 2 separate calls when I was talking to customer service I told them that if the inbound calling issue was not resolved I did not want my POTS number transferred as we would then be without a working phone number and that would be UNACCEPTABLE. Sure enough on March 7th I received an Email that our POTS number had been successfully transferred. And sure enough we were unable to receive inbound calls on all three numbers (the 2 from Sun Rocket and the ported #).

I called them again on March 8th (4th time I had to call) and was told that they were sure that it would only be 2 more days. How they knew this I don't know because they always sound like they have no information whatsoever and it always sounds like the trouble ticket is never updated because they never have any information to give me. Every time I called customer service I asked them to have someone call me with a status when they find something out and I have never to this day received one single call from anyone there. They take down or double-check my cell phone number each time I talk to them like they are actually going to do something with it.

My wife called them also and spoke with a manager who said he was sorry for the delay and he would credit us one monthly payment since our service is not working. Then we see on our credit card we have been billed for a double payment! Not only did they not give us a free month, they charged us double for one month. I called in immediatley (6th time we had to call I believe) and they checked into it and said it was a mistake and we should not have been billed at all and she can see the notation that we were supposed to receive the credit so she was going to talk to billing and have the entire charge removed. On 3/14/2006 I got an Email from Sun Rocket stating that a credit of $24.95 has been applied to our credit card. THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE A CREDIT FOR TWICE THAT AMOUNT. My wife called to ask when they thought inbound calling might be setup for our ported number, and customer service told her the end of March. My wife tried to ask why it would not be until the end of March, and the support woman just kept trying to over-talk her. My wife then asked why we only received a credit for $24.95 when we should be credited for the entire amount that was twice as much. The support woman irritatedly said that she knew that and that we would be getting another credit for the same amount... like we were supposed to know that. We were billed one amount for $49.90 or so, so why would we think that we would not be credited one time for the same amount. My wife wanted to ask more, but she had to ask the rude support woman to please let her finish. The woman just kept talking over the top of her and then just put my wife on hold without saying anything. My wife waited on hold for some time and then finally hung up, figuring the woman was not going to come back on the line. We are still waiting for the 2nd credit to appear.

On March 10th the inbound calling did actually begin working for the 2 Sun Rocket numbers. It seems like someone finally got around to looking into the issue. I have a feeling it was probably a 5 or 10 minute fix but nobody even bothered to look into it for over a month. WHY WOULD IT TAKE OVER A MONTH FOR US TO RECEIVE INBOUND CALLS ON YOUR OWN NUMBERS YOU ARE SUPPLYING TO US??

We are STILL waiting for inbound calling to work on the ported POTS number. We were without inbound service on all numbers for 2 or 3 days (nobody could call us at all) and we have been without service on this (our main number) for a week and a half so far.

We called SBC today and they said they could have our number back with them and working within 5 days.

If we do not get inbound calls working ASAP on our ported POTS number we are terminating our relationship with Sun Rocket.

Customer Service is too horrendous for us to continue dealing with:

* Every person we speak with has an accent so strong it is almost impossible to understand.

* The call quality half of the time when calling customer service is not good... it seems like there is a delay between them talking and us hearing it and vice-versa.

* Obviously this is an off-shore support center, which would be fine, but it seems that there is no communication between customer service and the Engineers who are supposed to be fixing the problems. My wife and I are both computer professionals and I have had a fair amount of telecom training so if an Engineer would call me back or if they would at least update the trouble-ticket so the customer service could let me know what was going on we may be more apt to understand what is going on. As it is, it seems that there is no support and nobody really cares.

* My hope is that the remaining issue will be resolved asap and we will never have to deal with customer service again. I am afraid if the issue is not resolved in the very short term, we will be forced to go back to SBC or to another VOIP provider.

I see that I am not the only one who has had these experiences:

»http://www.dslreports.com/reviews/2521

»http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/02/voip_review_sun.html

Based on all of the negative reviews of your customer service it appears that Sun Rocket as a company does not care enough to improve their customer service offering. I can't imagine that any cost savings you achieve by having an offshore, disconnected, uninformed support center outweighes the price you pay in lost customers.

As a side note, I am signed up through Telebay as a reseller of various services and I am trying out Sun Rocket as a personal test before I actually begin recommending it and reselling it to any customers. Based on my experiences to date, I can safely say that I will not be reselling this to anyone except people that I really, really do not like.

On top of all that, the last 3 days or so, we have been having quality issues with the phone service. My wife tries to call me from a SunRocket number and it rings on my end at my cell phone, but when I pick it up I can hear nothing. She does not even hear it ringing on her end when she calls me. I see that the call came from our Sunrocket number on my cell phone caller ID so I call back to our house and it immediately goes into our SunRocket voicemail. I try this 4 or 5 times and always end up in voicemail, it does not even ring at the house. This issue has happened several times in the last 3 days. This is unacceptable functionality.

I will expect a reply today or tomorrow or I will contact SBC to get our number back and immediately cancel this SunRocket service. I will also post this entire Email to the SunRocket review sites listed above as I am so dissatisfied with the entire experience.

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Sent to: builditbetter@sunrocket.com on 03.20.2006:
-----
Based on the lack of response, I assume this Email ended up at the same customer support center as the calls go to.

The last time my wife spoke with customer service, they indicated it may not be until March 30th that our inbound calling works for our transferred number. I believe our number transfer request was placed in the first week of February and SunRocket acquired the number on March 7th. We have been without use of that number already for 13 days and I am not going to wait another 10 days for you to get things working properly.

We will be calling SBC this afternoon to get our number back with them.

SunRocket has great prices and provides a free additional number which most providers do not. It is unfortunate that your customer support is non-existant, as this wipes out any benefits one would get by going with your VOIP service.

All: I've been in the tech industry for 11 years with companies who sell to companies like Sunrocket to enable VoIP. I've been a customer since January and will list the pro's and con's:

Pro's: Cheap, decent feature set, decent web site, cheap.

Con's:
NO INBOUND CALLS: I actually waited 2.5 MONTHS for INBOUND calls. I also didnt get dial tone until 2.5months in as well.

CALL QUALITY: Call quality is poor. The company as a default will say as we all know "you quality depends on the internet and your connection." This would be legitimate if I wasnt running a parallel VoIP service for my company over my VPN with NO problems whatsover over the SAME public internet. I would suggest that with the cheap price that Sunrocket is waiting for more subscribers before upgrading their back end systems and operations staff. Given that theorized strategy, Sunrocket users will suffer ebbs and flows of good quality then bad quality.

UNI-DIRECTIONAL COMMUNICATION: In mid conversation i could hear my colleagues but they could not hear me. When I hung up and tried to redial the conference bridge that number and any other number i dialed was busy. Not so with my cell or other VoIP line.

RESOLUTION: It took me 1.5hrs or so to get things resolved with tech support. At $199 a year you need to wonder how many times you need to do this and factor in how valueable your time is when determining exactly how "economical" the service really is.

SUMMARY: Sunrocket has 80K subscribers. Vonage has about or over 1Million. I went with Sunrocket because I thought with less subs I might get better service and quality. I am reconsidering this position. Vonage is heavily venture capital backed. To the tune of $600M in investment in the last 24+ months. They are building and investing heavily in state of the art technology and candidly there is value in that. Maybe 24.99/month and voice quality you can count on is better than $17 for a teenager second line quality like service. I dont know yet. I'm going to wait and see if Sunrocket gets their service working more smoothly. If they do I'll stay. If however this comes with massive price increases...i'm not so sure.

For instance Comcast is now offering a similar service that is VoIP only to the CO then is traditional POTs and gives 8hr stand by power in event of power outage for about same price as Vonage.

What does this mean? Better quality because your only "public internet variable" that all VoIP providers give you is limited to your local connection. THIS IS HUGE. You get one internet, tv and phone bill.

NOTE TO SUNROCKET: We like your service, we want to see the little guy win. Please fall forward and learn as you go, please improve your service daily, please keep your price where it is, please dont outsource "too many" tech support jobs to india. AND I like probably many others will stay....

Sincerly:
A TechAddict for money savings and productivity enhancement

Hi,

I've been using SR for 4 months now. After some initial problems with set-up and tel. no. transfer & some really bad experience with their customer service (I was trying to get my free phones shipped to me, which took about 3 months!) I must say overall: it works! - but nothing more. My internet connection is a bit slower than usuall. And one thing I can not proof: After I signed up with SR (and this was my only internet purchase in months) someone was able to make a duplicate card of the account I paid with and robbed my bank account...

S.

I love the service. Definately cheap. Only get echo here and there. As for Customer Service, I would give them a big 0. They repeat everything you say as if scripted and have no answers and don't understand what you are saying. I mean, they hear you, and they hear the words, but they have no understanding of what they mean when you put all the words together in a sentence. I called and was upset because it took much longer for inbound calls to come in and I also wanted to get the second number. OMG. It was a 40 minute call. I wanted a number in Cincinnati. She gave me a local number to my area and I kept saying look I want a local in Cincinnati, there are no long distance calls inside Cincinnati so any number from that area code should work. She kept telling me it might be long distance for them to call, and I said no, if it's a Cincinnati number it won't be long distance for them. Then she puts me on hold and comes back saying they don't service Cincinnati lmao. I got fed up and took the local number. I asked this woman not once but TWICE, is this number going to accept incoming calls immediately. She said YES, I can call it for you if you like, I had to decline because I was at work on my '15' minute break. Come to find out it wasn't working lmao Then when I got home and looked up numbers in Cincinnati I called back. I called to get the secondary number as a Cincinnati number. Not a problem, but they couldn't understand why I was upset with my call the previous night!!! I literally had to spell it out for her. Their service is pretty good, their customer service is HORRENDOUS!!!

Sunrocket has worked out all the kinks and it works great. It is so nice to finally have a bill that is affordable. It has really made my life easy not having to worry about getting a bill for a year,plus with the free phone and the 2 lines you really get the service for free when you add every thing up! It is great for people that need to save money. even if they have to up-grade the server from time to time,I am willing to have patience for growing pains.
THIS IS THE DEAL OF THE CENTURY
NO MORE LATE PAYMENTS,CONNECTION FEES,PAYMENT FEES,WARNING LETTERS PRICE INCREASES.
I hope all bills in the future head in that direction.
all I need to find now is a cheap high speed internet and cable!

Still waiting TWO MONTHS to get old Comcast phone number transferred to our SR line.

1st time they said we didn't complete a transfer request (not true) - 2nd time they said we didn't provide them with the correct address to Comcast...WTH?

They just cancle my account...and now they can't fix it. So I lost my phone number + I am without phone...and customer service is too horrendous...SUNROCKET is bad service. BEWARE!!

I have had SR for about four months and I am real happy. Some echo problems and talkamerica customers cannot reach me on my talkamerica transfered line. Hmmmm other peoples phone services can. I think its a talkamerica problem. Those who have TA can however reach me on the SR provided phone number (Hmmm?). I bought a new motorola modem with the latest complient updates for my high speed internet connection (I think it helps). I also bought two additional VOX phones and have them spread around the house. For the money and my needs I think SR works great. Also, with new technology their will be some bugs to work out.

I'm signing up for SunRocket now.

Have used SR for about a year now. I will renew. It's worked pretty well most of the time. Not 100% but more than 99%. Good enough for my needs.

Had two interactions with customer support.

One (last year) when the gizmo developed a fault; after talking to a couple of first level people I did eventually get a call back from an engineer who diagnosed the problem and arranged a next-day replacement. So after running the gauntlet of first-level support, I consider this good service.

Second, when I eventually ported my qwest number, the qwest line stopped but no incoming calls came via SR - strange effects, disconnects, jump direct to voicemail etc. Several calls to tech support resolved this. Of course they expect you to go through the obvious script solutions like power cycling etc. Hold times were not terrible. Turned out the gizmo must be outside the router for either firmware updates or config updates (not sure which) for the new number to work. As soon as I moved the gizmo, incoming calls on the ported number started working (after which I could move it back again).

I think the usual rules for tech support apply - you get what you pay for, and we are not paying very much. They seem willing enough to help if you are pleasant to them. My experience with tech support from Comcast et al has not been any more pleasant; in fact Comcast were certainly worse.

Hi,

I spent some time researching Sunrocket about 6 months ago, and decided to go with them based on the reviews at http://www.whichvoip.com. Though there are other companies that provide similar features, I have found the service from SunRocket to be excellent, and the price to be excellent value.

Rob

I have vonage and I am thinking about sunrocket.. the prices are nice.. But how about call quality.. I know local calls are good.. but I want to specifically know about overseas calls.. Vonage is terrible in that regard and thats why I am thinking about changing..

Well it has been almost a month and I still can not receive incoming calls on my number. I have called customer service several times and have the same help desk support flow chart read to me each time. At the end of the conversation they say "this will be escalated to an engineer and they will be in contact with you within 48 hours" Three trouble tickets and 10 days later I still have not been contacted. I have also sent a few emails to the same effect all have gone unanswered. I am always willing to exercise patience when it comes to emerging technologies, but Sunrockets support is beyond bad, it's non existent.

I got SR last month and has been nothing but impressed by call quality, email response from customer service and overall VOIP experience. I've just decided to now dump my existing wireline service and port my number to SR. GO SR....

A little nervous seconds just after registering.

I was amazed my voice mail was available seconds after paying.

I gave them a nice e-mail saying how great it was to take advantage of features before recieving the phone.

Then I got this in response.

Dear Pete,

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Your order is currently being processed. There's no available tracking number yet but we'll notify you when it becomes available.

Usually, orders are processed and shipped in 1 to 2 days, and customers receive the package in 5 to 7 business days or less.

The items include the following:

Product Code Quantity Description
SR Kit INN6328 1 Kit
SR-INN6328 1 Gizmo
WLM LTR NO SIG 1 Welcome Letter
SR GE DUAL 5.8 1 Phone

If you have additional questions, please contact SunRocket Member Services at 1-800-786-0132 or send an e-mail to memberservices@sunrocket.com. Service hours are from 7 am to Midnight (ET), 7 days a week.

Thank you for using SunRocket.

Sincerely,

Edgar Maddela
SunRocket Member Services

-----Original Message-----
From: Pete Santry (petesant@comcast.net)
Sent: Apr 14, 2006 11:49:27 PM
Subject: Awesome!

Hey,

Got my tax refund and decided its time to get a land line rather than going
outside of my semi underground APT

Due to cell.

Very happy with the features such as listening to voicemail on the web
seconds after I sign up and before I get the phone!!

This is the best Voip value wise..

Looking forward to my new phone!

Pete

I have enjoyed SunRocket since February of 2005 and couldn't be happier! The price is right, voice quality is as good or better than other telecom services, and customer service has been very helpful. I first tried SunRocket when I had DSL with BellSouth, but their DSL connection was not strong enough to support SunRocket. So I switched over to Comcast, which provides a much stronger signal. If Comcast goes down, I lose my telephone. So it's good to have a back-up.

Had SR for 1 year. I too was blinded by the price, overlooking things I took for granted with my POTS line. Something we cal RELIABILITY. SR slowly gravatated down towards the bottom with outages, noice, echo. Over time, most of these got fixed and I went about a month without seeing "SR down?" threads in another forum. Then, they sunk to a new low by alowing my number to be ported to Comcast digital telephone without my permission. Almost 30 days later, I got my number back and my service is working. Hopefull I am that it will stay up long enough for me to port over to another provider. I need service that stays up or at least is 90% uptime like pots. It could be 10.00 a month but what is a life worth? I or anyone else can't depend on SR to be there when needed so it's ALOHA to them and good luck to those who want to give them a try. Just ask yourself the above.. What is a life worth? 17.00 a month to stick it to ma bell or 30.00 for a POTS line that is up and working 99.999% of the time? Just make sure you have a cell phone as back up and sleep with it next to your bed. Just a warning.

Got my Sunrocket Gizmo yesterday at the same time as a new wireless internet service from Mesa Networks. (about 5 days after ordering it on line) Initially tried the Gizmo with my still-connected DSL service from QWEST and the VOIP light never came on. (256kbps down, 128kbps up)

Then the Mesa connection was up and running. I plugged in the Gizmo BEHIND my router and the voip light came on very quickly. Outbound and INBOUND calls were working immediately.

Initially I could not get the Gizmo to work in front of the router (Directly at the cabel modem)because my ISP required a Static IP address and the gizmo comes configured for DHCP. I called tech support, got someone IN THE STATES, and had clear directions on how to re-configure the gizmo within 5 minutes. I give an A for tech support. It would be an A+ but there should be available documentation on how to configure the Gizmo (not just set it up) without having to call tech support!

Call quality has been great for incoming voice. However out outgoing voice is 'jittery', like a cell phone. I have 1.5Mbps down and 500kbs uplink which should be plenty fast.
(I wish more people would put their connection speeds on here when talking about call quailty)

Overall after one day of service:
Setup: A
Call Quality: B-
Tech Support: A
Customer Support: Have not had to use it (but it could not be worse than Qwest)
Value: A+

(I'm going to save $30 a month over Qwest)Bye Bye QWEST! You should be losing customers by the "Bundle"!

I just got my gizmo today and hooked it up in front of the router. I got an immediate dial tone. I should mention that the free GE phones were included in the same box as the gizmo.

I then logged on to the website to set up voicemail and messed up my pin number. I decided to give customer service a try, especially after the horror stories on this page. They answered on the second ring, were very friendly and sorted out the problem in about a minute.

I took the opportunity to ask about the 10 day delay for incoming calls. Apparently on networks where they need to interface with Broadwing there is a problem with getting the circuit activated. The 10 days starts from the day they set up your number. The gentleman I spoke to said to give it a little leeway as there was a bit of backup but 15 days should be a very safe number.

The delay is a hassle but the outbound works fine and customer service is top notch. I'm quite satisfied at this point.

SunRocket service SUCKS!!!! The customer service is bad. You only talk to service representative who cannot help you with problems, they just type the information and send a ticket to GOD knows who. I was not able to use the SunRocket service because every time I connected to the internet it would disconnect the phone service, and house alarm issues. BellSouth has been trying to port my number back from SunRocket for three weeks and have not had any luck. I would not recommend SunRocket to anyone.

I've had sunrocket for about 1 month. Have had some tech issues, but found SR's customer service to be very helpful. My previous number was not eligble for portability transfer, so I can't speak on that issue.
There are occasional glitches, which are annoying - but it is only $17/month - no "gotchas", just like they advertise.
Before SR, I was using my Cingular cell too much, which always dropped calls, had poor customer service - and it was Mega-expensive. Overall it has been a good purchase for me.

Great service, worth it for the price, had some problems with sunrocket but resolved them quickly. Worth the wait if you do have problems with the service.

Sunrocket has turned out to be such a disappointment. I get garbled converstions, I have to move about for clarity, (as you do for a cell phone)& I get entirely too many dropped calls. After not having telephone service (inbound/outbound) for 2 days, I contacted their customer service via email to forward my complaints. This is a copy of what I sent them. Check out their response.

SUNROCKET SUCKS
1.) I AM EMAILING BECAUSE I HAVE BEEN UNABLE TO OBTAIN A DIAL TONE SINCE LAST EVENING (TODAY IS 5/3/06)
2.)ALL CALLS MADE OR RECEIVED ARE EITHER DROPPED, GARBLED, FADING IN & OUT OR ALL OF THE ABOVE
3.) THE GIZMO HAS TO BE RESET AT LEAST 3 TIMES DAILY BECAUSE IT INTERFERES /SLOWS MY COMPUTER OPERATION
4.)I AM EMAILING BECAUSE, THANX TO SUNROCKET I HAVE NO %(&$% PHONE & I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO CALL HOME ALL MORNING.
5.) THIS SERVICE HAS NEVER BEEN ANY GOOD FROM THE DAY I GOT IT. WHY DID I KEEP IT? I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A MATTER OF GETTING THE BUGS OUT.
6.) AS SOON AS I FIND A COMPARABLE COMPANY, SUNROCKET WILL BE DISMISSED.

FROM AN EXTREMELY IRATE SOON TO BE FORMER CUSTOMER

Their response

We are very sorry to hear that : However, I would just like to assure you that customer satisfaction is still our primary concern. And we always value our customers like you.

really really bad.
less than 2 weeks of activation and 10 open tickets

http://sunrocketsucks.blogspot.com/

I read this column and the above reviews and a lot of other mixed to negative reviews about every VOIP carrier. I prayerfully ordered Sunrocket service Thursday, received my gizmo and two promo phones on Friday by express mail, and installed in less than 30 minutes on Saturday. Except for a careless misteak I made in installation, which I quickly corrected, everything went without a hitch. I have voice mail up and running and both outgoing and incoming service work in less than two days from the time of my order. I have not yet: 1) requested turnover of my old number by my landline carrier; 2) patched my Sunrocket into my house telephone network, which is extensive; and 3) tried FAX, which Sunrocket says they do not support, but which some reviews have said is possible. At this point I couldn't ask for better performance for three times the price! I'll review again after I accomplish the three yet-to-be-completed functions. George Goolde

You will always get + and - reviews, the key is determining what about your setup helps or hurts the service quality.

I have DSL, a 2wire DSL/modem router, and 2.4 Ghz cordless phones. It's dropped one call in the last week, and if it continues to work well, I'll drop Bellsouth and my POTS and DSL and go to Cable and VoIP because of the telecom fees and bundling bungling. It is annoying though having the VoIP signal lost to the Gizmo (when you are not on a call), which kills your internet connection, and you have to unplug the VoIP modem, the router, and restart the computer.

SunRocket's VOIP service was actually good for me. Clear sound, no echoing...

But, their tech support SUCKS big time.

First of all nobody speaks English. It's English - Indian - Philippino HEAVY accent. They don't understand me and I don't understand them. On my different questions I was getting the same answer (probably read from the script).

When I subscribed their representative for some reason put down my name incorrectly. It was showing on caller id when I call someone. So, I've called tech support and asked if they can correct my caller id (it required just 5 keystrokes). Since then I continue to call every day to see what is happening with my ticket, but every time I've got the same exact answer: "We sent it to our Provisioning Department. They will send you an email."

After two weeks it was still not corrected and I've realized why... their Provisioning Department is not on this planet!!! It is, probably, on Mars somewhere. That's why it takes such a long time. It might never be done because of the electrical storms on Mars.

Anyway, I cancelled the service. That was a hard decision for me, I really liked the service, but I couldn't listen anymore to my friends laughing when they see my misspelled name on their caller id.

SR's tech support treats their clients like dirt. Seems that nobody cares. Once you are in, you are on your own. No help whatsoever. Shameful, but true. The only guy who tried to be helpful was the guy in cancellation department. He wanted to put priority on my ticket, but I refused. I was not in the mood to play their game for another week.

I guess the owners of SR have to learn a thing or two about running the business.

SunRocket could be a good choice if they get rid of their stupid provisioning department which is how they call tech support. Provisioning department is probably just one guy sitting in a shed somewhere in india or philippines without the telephone and (possibly) without the computer.

There is absolutely no technical support. They hardly speak English and they don't know anything technical. Once you get into their system, you are on your own. Good luck. I had a minor problem with my phone setup and 4 weeks later I still have the same problem. So I had no other alternative then to cancel the service.

Big disappointment. If you can afford few bucks more a month, go with somebody else.

THIS IS THE WORST VOIP COMPANY EVER (when it comes to tech support).

I've had SunRocket for over a year and now I'm starting to think they are getting too big for their britches.

I recently moved and am having issues that I won't get into here. The main problem is that they are not equipped to handle complex issues. They have ONE email address that random reps respond to so you contantly feel like you are starting the issue explanation over all the time. Same thing with calling...no direct lines, random reps.

The process has been so frustrating that I am looking to switch to another VOIP provider.

I have SR for a couple of months now. I have faced a couple of glitches, but they were fixed and now it is working without issues. The quality of the tech support is variable. When they say they have opened a ticket, usually it is not followed up on. However, I have also spoken to more informed tech support who were able to resolve the issue at hand.

Attached to a comcast cable 1.2mb down and 385k up.    

        
I had Packet 8 VOIP service which was very reliable with only a few echo calls to specific numbers. With them I had to dial 10 digits every where and had to pay extra for 911 service.

      I switched to SR for price and 7 digit dialing. I was blown away by their extensive feature sets built-in to their price. Not to mention the $3.00 free international calls per month at really low rates.

      Set up was a breeze. I initially had some clipping, they did a firmware update, then adjusted the dynamic bandwith setting in the Gizmo. This almost eliminated my clipping. The tests they recommend shows my Comcast cable connection to be outside of their recommended parameters for max pause 3 out of 5 tests so I guess I'll never get rid of it all.

      It was slow getting my old number switched over...about 30 days. I have called customer service several times and all of them spoke english very well and were very courteous. I don't like that they can't transfer a call to the 2nd or 3rd level support and have to do it by ticket and have them call me back. It took almost a week to get them to call me back. The tech that did call was very knowledgeable and helpful. He actually sent me the instructions to log into my gizmo and play with the settings to see how that improved the clipping.

      My gizmo has developed the problem of disconnecting calls after 3 rings before it goes to voice mail.... I am having problems getting them to agree to send me a new Gizmo.

      Install: 10
       Quality: 8
      Support: 5 (keep in mind they are growing at a rate faster than they can support. Yet my calls were answered with in 3-5 minutes. That is better than almost any other company.
      Features: 10

      I like innovative companies like SR. I understand growing pains and am trying to be patient but they must get their act together soon or my wife will insist I get rid of them.

      There is an important thing to consider when connecting your network up at home. With the cable LAN connected directly to the Gizmo then your personal router or computer connected to the Gizmo allows it (the Gizmo) to manage the bandwidth when the pc requests data and a voice call is in progress the Gizmo can limit the PC to a specific amount of bandwidth (dynamically) to preserve voice quality.

      If you put your personal router on the cable first then hang the Gizmo off the back you will experience clipping when the PC accesses the internet while on a call. I agree this should be handled by the QOS flag in the IP packet through the router but some devices don't look at that and only pass the data.

So far so good... Ordered on 5/5, received the Gizmo on 5/11. Hooked it up and it worked right away... both for inbound and outbound calls. Call quality was spotty the first night but it was fine in a day or so. Love having two lines and being able to have one in another area code!

Dear Users,

I have been a happy vonage customer so far, till I got a Cinco De Mayo promotion which said that I can have two years of unlimited package for $199. I qyuickly signed up for that on May5th, 2006. I also requested them to take over the phone number which is presently with Vonage.

May 10th, I received an email that my gizmo has been shipped. When I received it, I followed the install instructions and still there was no dial tone on the phone1 port.

I contacted support on MAy17, 2006 and the lady asked me to perform several things and finally said that she is going to escalate this to a network engineer and he will call me between 3 to 6 days. I was pretty pissed off with this as with vonage, I had to deal with exactly 0 problems. I never had any single ticket with Vonage. SO, I waited ..and waited ..then I called again after 3-4 working days in the veening and found a gentleman on the phone. I spent not less than an hour with him doing several things, including hard reset by inserting the PIN into the Gizmo and nothing worked. VPIP light is solid on, I can browse the Internet by connecting my PC to the LAN port of GIzmo but still there is no dial tone on phone port1.

This is May26th, 2006 , and I did not yet receive any support call from sunrocket. There is no status on my phone number change yet. I had to pay one more month of vonage fees because of the delays of these incompetent persons on sunrocket.

Just my 2 cents, that saty away from SUnRocket as they are not just cheap , they are cheap and BAD.
I am also thinking of contactive some consumer forums to make them aware about these false promises on SUnRocket and how they are milking money from consumers like me,,,,upfront $200.

In Nut Shell....$$$$ STAY AWAY FROM SUNROCKET $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Am considering SunRocket, but am concerned about being able to handle six or seven phone handsets. SR rep says you just disconnect your current provider land lines inside the provider's box, and then all the jacks will work on SR. I have Verizon FIOS. Anyone else done this, or understand exactly what he's saying?

i have had only bad experience with SunRocket.
my internet via cable frequently disrupts , if i place the gizmo before the router. my line has gone dead for 2 weeks now. customer service has not been very helpful. i had go thru this farce of booting down and up all devices everytime i had call them up ( 10 times to be specific ). i am still waiting on the engineer to call me. he once did leave me message , but did leave me the gereral 1800 call back no. and the service people can only note down the problem again and forward a note to the engineering dept.
I WOULD NOT ADVISE TO FALL FOR THE CHEAP PRICES OF SUNROCKET, it is not worth it. although the local voice quality is good. interantional call quality is pretty bad. even to europe , forget the fareast.

I purchased the SUNROCKET on 04th June 2006. I got the packet after 5 days. When I installed the SUNROCKET as per the Instuctions Manual it was not at all working. When I make any calls to SUNROCKET from my cell phone it was saying " Choice One... You are trying to call the number which is not in Service or this number does not exist."
Then I called up Customer Care. They asked me to follow the same steps of installation again and again. But it did not work. Then they told me to wait for 10 days to get it activate. After 10 days i tried today but the problem still exist.
I am NOT ABLE TO MAKE ANY OUTBOUND/INBOUND calls from SUNROCKET VOIP.
Again I am going to call Customer Care today to see what else they are suggesting.
Think before going for it.

Mine works ok. Some outages but if you don't use your phone a lot, it's perfect. Occasional problems but not much worse than landline or cell. If you use your phone a lot, you're going to be frustrated. I use mine moderately. I did a 2.5 hour 3 way call where I was the host and it worked perfectly. YMMV I'm waiting for the next 2 years for $199.00 offer.

I received my Sunrocket gizmo back in the later part of May. I got my system to work right away, but the phone line would go dead after 5 minutes of talking. After talking with the Sunrocket rep, it was found that you have to increase your bandwith capacity on the gizmo. Once they do that,my phone experience has been heavenly. No problems.
To Jmoore, yes you can do what sunrocket says you can do with multiple phones. Just unplug the outside line that comes into your house and plug in the line from the gizmo and your entire house will be wired. It works beautifully.
Go to epinions for other comments by other posts.
This is the best thing since sliced bread. But we need to be careful. The FCC is wanting to start taxing like a regular phone. We must stand up or this will be no different than your current land line.

I’m an engineer and fairly tech-savvy. I signed-up for two Sun Rocket accounts, paying for a year’s worth of service for each. Initially I was pleased, but the voice quality fell-off and Sun Rocket is either unable or unwilling to correct the problem. Without exaggerating, I can tell you that I have spent over 50 hours of my time trying to get the problems cured. That amounts to $2500.00 worth of my time. So tell me, where is the savings in switching to Sun Rocket?

If you want crappy voice quality, lots of static on the line, hit-and-miss service, unresponsive customer “support” and place no value on your time, by all means, sign-up for Sun Rocket. You will not be disappointed.

My guess is that they will go out of business within the next 18 months.

You will all be happy to know that Sunrocket customer service is coming back in the US.

I signed up with SunRocket back in May for one of my 2 lines I had with AT&T. At first the number they provided would not accept incoming calls. The "Gizmo" shipped fast, and connection was smooth, but still no inbound calls. Level 1 tech support is much to be desired. I ported over my AT&T number, and was able to receive calls on that number before the number they gave me. I canceled the number they gave me, and decided to order a second account (2 years $199), so that both of my AT&T numbers would be transfered. At that time I got a new number for the second account, and a new "signature" number for the first. Both worked immediately.
My overall experience is this: The service is not perfect, but neither was AT&T (had to call AT&T repair weekly for problems!). If you have a rock solid internet connection, you should not have any problems. I was able to correct most issues by reading forums, and "tweaking" myself, rather then wait for CS to translate and comprehend my problems. By reading the forums, I was also able to learn the tricks to contacting US based technicians, and get any problems I could not correct on my own taken care of.
I am getting 2 lines, 4 inbound numbers for $16.00/month for 2 years, compared to $160/month for AT&T. The savings are incredible, and worth it, even with a few problems here in there. But hey, I had problems at $160/month also! Rumor has it that SunRocket is bringing back the Customer Service to the States, most likely due to the number of complaints, and that will help improve the service. If you read alot of reviews, that seems to be one of the weak points. The other weak point is one that everybody overlooks, which is what this, and ANY VoIP service depends on... an Internet connection that is problem-free. Most are quick to balme the VoIP provider, when it may be their IP provider, or their own network setup that is at fault.
VoIP is not for everybody, rather for those that are patient, and those that are willing to take a bit of the troubleshooting on themselves, rather than have somebody hold their hand forever. If you are not willing to learn and be patient, then stick to POTS.

I signed up with SunRocket in April of 06 and "Service" was marginal. Echos were a constant problem. Customer service is about the poorest that I have ever experienced. Hold times in excess of 60 minutes. Their escalation process takes 72 hours for any problems that can't be correct with them on the phone. I was without phone server for over 4 days and still never heard back from them and I finally cancelled the service.

This quality is very poor, and customer server (if that is what you can call it) is the worst that I have ever experienced. There Managers are rude and need some additional training on who there customers are.

My advice is don't get SunRocket. I switched to Vonage and it is Crystal Clear!

I was going to switch over to S. R. until I read the reviews. I don't think I will be doing that in the near future. People have another life besides putting up with type of nonsense. Co's think that moving co's off shore will help their buss.. They are wrong. I do not deal with Microsoft for this very reason.When you move to the U.S. give me an E Mail Thanks. G. Mc Laughlin

I have just started up with Sunrocket. The sound quality- outgoing- is horrible and I've been on the phone w/customer service about it several times. It's still not resolved. I am able to hear the person I am talking to very clearly but they cannot understand me well, sometimes not at all. I've had my cable company out here to upgrade my signal but it still hasn't helped. I must say, though, customer service reps have been great every time I've called. The wait time is minimal. Everyone I have talked to have been extremely nice and willing to work with me. I agree with others though, it is a little diffucult to understand speech with the heavy accents. Has anyone else had issues with sound quality? Any suggestions? This last time I spoke with someone, they told me to do the "speed tests" AGAIN, and to call back with the results. I'm praying this will get worked out because I don't want to be out of $200 if I have to switch back to a land line. I acutally did have Vonage first and had the same problem. I thought switching to Sunrocket would be better. So far, not so. This whole phone thing has been difficult....I'd rather spend my free time with my 4 kids than on the phone with customer service trying to get my phone to work.

PLEASE DO NOT CONTRACT SUNROCKET SERVICES EVER!!!!

I have been a customer of SunRocket for more than a year and during this period I have many service outages caused by them and not by my ISP. However, I learned to live with them and mostly due to the very nice apologetic emails from their CEO. However now I am amazed by their terrible service. My GIZMO stopped to talk the modem cable and therefore I stopped having telephone service. The modem was talking to the other devices and our access to Internet was available. We spent 3 days on troubleshooting the same thing and from day one I asked them to please replace the GIZMO because I knew the WAN interface was bad. The WAN, MGT and VOICE lights were off. I have been a Network Engineer for 20 years and I know very well that an interface in a box can go bad even though the power light and other lights on it are on. At the 4th day they still did not believe me and asked me to wait for another 24 hrs until someone could make a decision to send me a replacement. I told them from day one that I was having an emergency and that I needed the home phone service in order to communicate with my important contacts such as my insurance companies that were trying to reach me. No even with that emergency they made a decision. During those 4 days I was given 3 different tickets for the same problem and not resolution was provided to me. I finally had it and canceled the service. I asked them to send me an email to confirm the cancellation and they said I would receive it within the next 24 hrs. I asked the for the confirmation email because I need them to make a refund in my credit card since I paid in advance for 12 moths of service. It has been 48 hrs and I have not received anything from them and either I have received an answer to the last two emails I sent them with regard to the problem. I think the situation is that the customer service people and the tech support people are the same because one of them told me during this process. Therefore they change their story every time and cover each other. I tried to talk to some one in management and it was not possible. You do not want to have one of your critical services such as your home telephone on the hand of this people. I wish I could reach some one in management to let them know about this outrageous case. I also would like to find a way to make a complaint to the FCC or Virginia Department of Consumer Affairs because I really find this type of quality of service completely unacceptable.

SunRocket is currently starting a new customer service call center is southern missouri, mostly using old mci employees. All tech support personel are given three weeks of training, hopefully some of the service issues will be resolved then.

I started training today for customer service for SunRocket, their goal is currently to improve customer service. Today marks the first day day of training for the Springfield Missouri call center. They are hiring 500 local people, mostly ex MCI employees with years of customer service already under their belts.

I wanted to say thank you, without your feed back, they wouldn't have opened this center.

Sunrocket is a social and economical revolution.How many of us get our credit tarnished by the Babybells for phone bills.Sunrocket is the only phone company in USA that plays fair by clearly stating its prices.I will never go back to the slavery days of Verizon and concorts.

I ordered SunRocket on 7/8/06 using their online interface. I had one small glitch in that it didn't add my signature number but otherwise all was good. I called tech support and after a two minute wait spoke to a knowledgeable tech that had my signature number added in less than five minutes.

I received my gizmo by Friday the 14th (I had received an email with a tracking number on the 11th) at which time I plugged it in according to the instructions and everything worked within two minutes, including incoming calls to both my main line and signature number.

Everything to date has been excellent from the service and speed in which it was delivered to the sound quality (better than my current provider Qwest). I am going to give it another week and then cancel my land line.

I did initially hook up the gizmo directly to the cable modem but once it was up and running I moved it behind my router/firewall and it continues to work flawlessly. In other sites discussing the service I have seen it is apparently important to move the gizmo outside your perimeter occasionally for it to receive updates etc. I will post back if I have any issues with this. One caveat is that I have read that some DSL customers seem to have issues due to slow uplink speed on their circuit. ; I am on a 7M/768kb cable connection (Comcast Tele-worker) so your mileage may vary.

I had none of the negative experiences some posters have had and think this is a great deal. Time will tell but with me only paying +/-$13 (I got in on their three free month special so 199/15) I can put up with a little heartburn, but so far so good.

I got Sunrocket service in March of 2006. It worked for 3 days. I called customer service who sent me out a new adaptor and it worked for 2 days, all in all I finally got rid of Sunrocket in April of 2006 after the service worked for less than one week.And this less than one week of service cost me over $40.00 if you include sign up.So what do I have 2 cordless phones and a lot of headaches and packet8 with no problems.

We have been Sunrocket customers since September 2005 and are looking forward to another year of it starting this September. My brother-in-law researched all the VOIP companies available in the spring and summer of 2005 and determined that Sunrocket was the best service for their family. Then in September, on his recommendation, we signed up for SR as well. Our phone number was not transferrable so we have not had those issues to worry about. We just got two new numbers and the distinctive ring has ALWAYS worked for us. We signed up before the free phones were part of the deal, so we haven't had that to worry about. We haven't even had to deal with customer service much, except in November, when they were trying to work out the e-911 issues. They were always very helpful and attentive, via both phone and email, at that time.

We love our SR. We love being able to spend as much time on the phone as we want, knowing that we don't owe any money until September, when we renew our service with the annual plan. We have a lot of friends and family who are long distance and we would never be in the kind of contact with them that we are in now, if we still had a land-based phone service.

There have been a some hiccups in the last 10 months, but I honestly attribute that more to the cable connection we were using for several months starting not long after we signed up. The cable internet would go out, and then of course our phone would go out. Whenever someone was heavily using the cable broadband, VoIP quality went down, but I blame this on the cable rather than on SR.

A couple months ago we switched to "dry-loop" DSL with Verizon and got rid of our cable tv and cable internet in an effort to save money. I can think of only one time in those couple months that we've had the phone go out compared to many more times when we had the cable. We have a 3.0 Mbps internet connection and that seems to work just fine. I absolutely agree with TR Pierro who posted on June 25 that people are quick to blame the VoIP provider, when the whole thing about VoIP is that it depends upon a problem-free internet connection and maybe the IP provider is to blame. Someone commented that it knocks out their internet. What if the internet connection is the problem and that knocks out the Sunrocket? That's what has happened here. I also agree with the person who wrote that they wished people would post their internet connection speed when they put in complaints, because that in itself might be a problem. I wouldn't dream of using the lowest "high speed" option with Verizon. Not enough broadband to support the phone service.

Let me tell you, we had so many hassles with Verizon DSL where we used to live, way before we had SR. Customer service was a pain, we'd get double-charged for things, and our service was dropped very frequently even though we were perfect in making our payments. I was very reluctant to go back to Verizon DSL for our internet and VoIP, but we've had no problems and I'm very glad about it.

I like to support "younger" companies who are really trying to be different from others and I'm so happy our own experience with SR has been a good one. In our cutting costs, one thing that was not an option was dropping our broadband internet because we can't imagine having to go back to standard phone service!

I have been a SunRocket customer for over a year now and overall am happy. Initally, there were a few outages but I haven't had any in almost a year.
The Voice quality is good, features are good and customer service I don't use much.
Also, there a software called "signature Message Screener" that you can download to your PC. It allows you to see who's calling your home number and you can listen to messaging being left on the system.
You need to have a reliable broadband connection for VOIP to be successful.

I will recoomend SunROCKET plus you can take your box with you if you travel to Canada or Puerto Rico

Try visiting www.sunrocketforum.com for help. They are not paid, but they help out more than the real tech support and they setup guides and troubleshooting steps you can do on your own. And no... it's not my site.

I signed-up for a year's ($199 worth) of SunRocket's service on July 1st. By July 10th I had the GIZMO and two included phone sets installed behind my hi-speed cable modem. I was able to place outbound calls immediately. I waited the TEN whole days to start receiving inbound calls. As of tonight (July 23rd) I still only get a canned message from CHOICE ONE stating that my new SunRocket numbers have either been disconected or do not exist. I called SunRocket's help line several times to get several different heavily accented CANNED responses to what are probably thousands of dissed customers. I am seriously thinking of contacting my credit card issuer to change my card so that I can't be ripped off any further by SunRocket.

I have been using SunRocket for a month now and love it. The Voice quality is as good if not better than my land line. The only problem I had was porting my number. The sales rep told me when I signed up that it would be no problem. Then when I went to do it, of course there was a problem. Something to do with 911 and the area that I live in. I was not happy with how long it took them to figure this out (1 month). I kept getting told I would receive an email in a week, with forms to sign. As I said this went on for a month, and after several phone calls, I finally find out that the # is not portable. My solution was to port the number to my cell phone, which was not a problem.
As I said, the quality of the service is great and the price can't be beat. If I didn't have a small business with the old number, the porting wouldn't have even been an issue.
Service = 10
Customer Service= 5

I set up my SR at the end of March 06, Had a few glitches that were corrected by a couple calls to the tech support, I did have a couple calls that I couldn't understand the tech, but, got past that, since I have bought a lot of coffe at 7-11's, and we did dedicate some bandwithe to the upload.. I have had a couple snaps crackles and pops since, but they have come and gone and everything is working fine, occasionally I have things happen that I am not sure whether to blame on SR or Road Runner. I get 500down and just under 300 mbps up, and all in all, I couldn't be happier with SR. I am glad to see that the Tech Support will be coming home to the US.. That is going to cause a rush for the jobs at 7-11 and Dunkin Donut.. Thats fine tho.. To the guy that dont know where to plug the line into the wiring of the house.. Unplug the outside connection, leaving all the inside wire wired together.. You can then plug that cord into any outlet in the house and it will backfeed to all you outlets.. Very simple.. Good luck with that..

Sun Rocket is not worth anything.

I have a phone which does not receive callfs for the past 9 days.
They say wait another day or Two

It is level three support and they never ever return calls.

They have me in a strange hold since my number has trasfered, and I can not get another VOP to come in since I still have Sun Rocket

I've had Sunrocket for well over a year and generally been pleased with it, although they experience continuing "growing pains" that take out service for a few hours at a time on a regular basis (every couple of weeks). Unfortunately I have found their customer service to be abominable. Recently I was without service for almost two weeks, during which time I was repeatedly told by supervisors that they couldn't do anything except refer me back to their service department, who ran me through the same set of tests four times. Turned out the gizmo was defective, but it took several 45-minute phone calls using day-time cell minutes (and being hung up on twice by their phone system) to get a new one sent. Their supervisors were entirely unhelpful and advised me that my only recourse if I was unhappy was to email their "builditbetter@sunrocket" address, which was a joke - never did hear back on that. It took their Member Services almost a week to respond to my requests for help, and I was never contacted by Sunrocket without having to harangue them myself for follow up. I would no longer recommend Sunrocket to anyone; treating customers that shabbily is inexcusable, growing pains or not.

I got SR about 3 months ago. I agreed that SR tech-support is WORTHLESS. When you call with a problem the tech-support level one can not never solve the problem. They give you a stupid ticket number and wait for tech-support level three to call you back in 72 hours (72 hrs for SR is 5 day later). For the past 3 months my experience with this company had been a growing pain, problems after problems.
1. Problem transferring my number.
2. Voice mail problem.
3. Retrieving voicemail problem.
4. Private and anonymous call blocking problem which was created when SR was fixing problem No. 3 which can not be solve until today 8/23/06.
5. Outbound caller ID that not one can solve until today 8/23/06.
Before SR fixed the voice mail problem the standard message (private calls are not accepted by this number) will play to people with private number. After that day everyone get a different signal or message, some people get a busy signal, other error message, other nothing for other the line keep ringing.
I called the super tech-support, again and I received a call after 5 day (again is suppose to be in 72 hours), tech-support told me that when the Block Anonymous Calls feature is ON, every call with a private number will get a busy signal, this is the standard for SR. I told the tech-support that was not true because this is happening since they fixed my voice mail and if what he said was true how come everyone is getting different signal & message. The tech-support answering me by saying that is not SR, is the caller company, they have they own message. I told him, you just said that the busy signal is SR feature. I called the SR number from my cellular phone and I got an error message. I called Verizon and I explained the situation, the tech-support from verizon called my SR number and he did not get a error message or a busy signal from his end the phone just keep ringing but from my end the SR line was not ringing. Verizon said, is your carrier. I called back SR and until today they have not fixed the problem…
SR is also blaming verizon for the outbound caller ID. I disable my outbound caller ID, this mean that my number and name will not show up, guess what, it is true my number and name do not show up but a different number show up in the other party caller ID 212-2920147.
I call SR this past Friday 8/18/06 and I told them that I was going to cancel my service if these two problem are not solve. The CS promised two months credit which I do not think I will get and promised to escalated the problem to a different level.
I will not recommend this company to nobody, customer service, tech-supper level one and three, supervisor and managers are all worthless. Since my first call until the last one I think I spoke to more than six supervisors and managers and more than 15 tech-support without any solution to the problems.
I would like to know if anyone if having problen with the Block Anonymous Calls feature and the outbound caller ID.
Remember cheap is not always good, because in the long run it cost more.
I wonder who is writing all those wonderfull review about SR maybe their own customer services…..

Customer service is non-existent. But thank you to Graham Allan who posted here at April 7, 2006 06:51 PM. Using his info I was able to recieve incoming calls.
We have verizon fiber optic internet service and we installed the gizmo after the verizon router. In this configuration the gizmo was able to make calls but not receive. However, as Mr. Allen discovered, I was able to receive calls to the ported number after I plugged the gizmo directly into the fiber optic wall jack. The verizon router is then plugged into the gizmo and the computer seems to have no problems accessing the internet. It did take about 20 min for the gizmo's phone led to turn back on after plugging the gizmo into the fiber optic jack.

I found these posts while seaching the web trying to find an "insider phone number" to SR customer service. If anyone can get a direct line to tech support please post it. I never spoke to tech support but, if you do, see if you can get their call back number and then post it.

Multiple calls to customer service were of no help. Standard reply is "unplug/replug gizmo." Even after quoting the SR customer bill of rights #5 (Commen Sense Resolution: Policies will never stand in the way of doing the right thing. All SunRocket representatives have the power to use reasonable judgment to address your concerns and "make it right".)I was unable to talk to a manager or "advanced tech." Or even get a name of a manager.

We did get a great deal assuming there are no other problems. Two years for $199.

Sunrocket sucks!!! I've had the service for 3 weeks and I still cannot receive calls. The CSR keeps promising me that they will fix it and still it doesn't work. I'm gonna change back to my prior VOIP service.

I have been thinking about changing my provider from VONAGE to SR to save money. I first checked the SR site to read information and found there may be a problem with TiVo and SR. I then started checking reviews and found these posts. So many are negative and folks having real concerns that I can't see changing and paying for an inferior service at this time--even if I save $10 per month! What do you save if service and workability is very spotty. My two cents worth--even before joining up.

I've had Sunrocket for 2 months and was satisfied with the service so I authorized them to transfer over my business number. Now when prospective clients try to call they get a "number disconnected" message. No one at Sunrocket can even guess when my number will be working! All my business is done on the phone so they have put me out of business. Learn from this and NEVER try to transfer a business number to Sunrocket.
Ted Novak

I am so interested in Voip.But so pity,there are no any legal Voip services here in China.Anyone can inform me the future of Voip ?Thanks

I've used 3 different VOIP companies, my problem with Sunrocket is they were unable to port any of my existing Bell South or Verizon numbers, Packet 8 was able to port the numbers. I'm also trying VOIP.com and having all kinds of problems with their service as well as softphone. Any suggestions on a good company with softphone would be appreciated. sanders@sandersdupree.com

SUNROCKET IS THE WORST OF WORST.
Paid 199.00 in startedt he phone transfer fronm Cingular and it has been 3+ months and still they have no clue. Everytime I call them I get a brand new answer. i can get a better customer service @ local Chinese store than those techies in Philllipines.. I have spent hours and hours to get this working but no luck. Finally I cancelled and not they will not give me the refund. Because their refund system has a problem (last 19 days???) and thats why they can not give the refund.
shameful commerece.
*******stay away friends*********

I'll give SunRocket a mixed review; maybe 6 stars out of 10. While their features and pricing are very nice, the MOST IMPORTANT feature of a telephone service is voice clarity. I seem to be talking to their tech service people every few days trying to get an echo and chatter off the line. Initial calls to customer service took forever (are they outsourced to the Philipines?) but once they acknowledge that the problem deserves extra attention you get a private number and an immediate person on the other end. Unfotunately, even replacing their gizmo hasn't resolved the voice quality issue. They have been trying to resolve this for more than a month. Just yesterday I learned that my FAX isn't working through their line. I guess you get what you pay for.

I got the 1st sun rock with no problem. Then it was down hill from there. I had a number transferred - it stopped working for 1 week and customer service kept saying it was completed but it was not working. After 3 days on the phone with some CSR in Manila, I discovered that they all had a script to read from. The real guys who would even think of doing something was in the state of MO. So you have to call about 10 times and get lucky to get the state of MO call center. There I got some attention but it took another 4 days to get the transfer number to work.
After 3 days of working, call forwarding stopped working - same stuff, call in to Manila, then to technical support, who puts a ticket that will be responded in 24-48 hours, which is 4 calendars since it was the weekend.
Most frustrating was the denying that anything was work and that someone was working on it. MO told me the truth - this is only the 2nd call that has the number not working?

If you value your sanity at a few bucks more go somewhere else. Sunrocket is for the basement phone or the fax line where you don't care about makeing the call or recieving it or using any of the features.

I had SR for 30 free trials on $199 per year service and should have gotten a free with it which never got it. Customer reps are rude and have no clue. Email response on status and follow-up is also slow or will never get. Was offered three free months of service for free phone never got and beginning to wonder if they ever had the GE 5.8ghz phone. I sure SR will give me my three free months for replacement of the free phone after the end of my term and to make sure I stick around and keep the $199 service fee. SR was to replace my Vonage VOIP service and now decided to keep and was going with SR due to price. Price is not always the way to go due to lack in price also lack in service. SR member service is only available from 6 or 8 am EST till 12 MIDNIGHT EST. What happen after 12midnight if your service has issue? Wait till morning? Also, wait time for member service take minimum 15 mins. Their motto of “NO GOTCHA” really means "Gotcha". Will keep my Vonage VOIP service even it cost me $24.99 a month at least I have 24x7 service available with only less then 2mins wait on phone and so far service been reliable and issue gets correct via 24x7 service.

I signed up mid-July. Since I don't like the idea of switching just to switch back, I took my time and thought of questions. Not one cust. svc. person ever indicated I needed to transfer my number via an online form. I found out a month after waiting.

Yet, another month later there was another hitch--and an email that was pretty critical to my transfer number that was sent to one of their depts instead of me--again, I discovered this when I called to find out what was taking so long.

Going on over three months now since I signed up and still no communication from SR that my number transfer has occurred.

I've paid my $199 up front and am still paying for my land line service!! (About $250 total since I signed up with SR).

This is terrible! I was talking to a friend last night and her phone kept on making a buzzing sound. She commented her husband had signed up for the phone service, jokingly I asked her if it was SR, she said it was and advised me NOT to sign up for it. I told her it was too late, and how long I've been waiting.

Sun Rocket did not work for me, it has waisted lots of time, the gizmo is not reliable at all. the VOIP lights go off, all the time, when it goes off the calls drop, in order to get back the voip light it will take hour to do it, this will eats up lots of time, but I like their, voice quality and voice mail retrieval very nice. bottom line SR is not yet matured. may be after 5 years it will get better.

I've had SunRocket for 2 weeks. Call quality is good.

I've had one call dropped when VOIP light went out.

Yesterday I couldn't make a 3-way call work.

Outgoing fax calls work, but incoming fax calls connect but do not receive the fax.

I'm still waiting to decide whether I need to switch to another carrier.

I currently have the SunRocket Service and find it to be great. Occasionally I have had a couple of issues. However most people never notice , but the POTS Analog lines have problems as well.

PRO's: Service comes with 2 lines as part of the Service. "Others charge extra for this service."
Website has many useful tools. You can set up your voicemail to email you automatically so you never miss a call. Find Me Forwarding Feature is the best Feature I have seen from any phone service. You can set phone service to Do Not Disturb. "Someone should give a Nobel Peace Prize to the individual who came up with that feature."
No more Mid Dinner calls, or calls in the middle of an important Movie.

911 Service works, as long as you enter the correct address when setting up your account online.
Very very easy to use. I am impressed.

CONS:
Because VOIP is a new and emerging technology I expect it to have some problems.
I have had a couple of calls drop. Experienced Technical issues logging into the website, and on 1 occasion someone called my house and the phone rang 10 times before they hung up.This was when the service was set to go directly to voicmail. However SunRocket stated on their website when I logged in that they were experiencing an area outage.

Regards,
MALCOLM

Some facts about Sunrocket that many people are complaining about... in defense to the customer service/care techs representing the company...
Yes, I work for Sunrocket.
No, I do not agree with their current method of "tickets" and not being able to do live transfers to the necessary depts such as higher level Tech, Provisioning, Billing, etc. In fact, the majority of people I work with despise the fact that we cannot serve the customer in the ways that would be most appreciated. Our hands are tied in many ways until the company grows large enough to support a staff to serve the customer in that manner. I personally, cannot wait for that day to come.
As for the 30 day wait period for number transfers... that is an FCC regulation. The existing carrier has 31 days to inform Sunrocket, or whoever is requesting the transfer, of their position. Sunrocket requests the carrier to give them access to the number in approximately 2 weeks. Most carrier do not respond until at or near their 31 day deadline. As soon as we get a response, the customer is sent an email, which states there is a rejection for whatever reason or that the transfer is ALMOST complete. No.. often the transfer is not as complete as I feel it should be, but it is more than the push of a button or a flip of a switch. Often there is a 24 hr turn around time.
The Gizmo... well... we cannot just replace a Gizmo as easy as customers wish. There are a few key elements where we can actually ship one out on the first call level... most cases have to go to the highest level of tech support to have that approved.
If you ever feel a Sunrocket rep is rude or acts maliciously... it is your responsibility to let the company know this. Every rep is required to give their first name... you can ask which call center they are in and every single call that comes in is required to be issued a ticket number, whether it be an updated ticket or a new ticket number. If it isnt documented - no ticket- it didnt happen.
VOiP is a new technology. We dont support businesses, we dont support faxing. Your second signature number costs $3 per month. Once your number is ported, if this causes you to have 2 signature/anywhere numbers.. call us, have us delete one - any reasonable rep will issue you credit for the $3 if you were charged unknowingly. Sunrocket is not a rip off - we give you a fair refund without question if you were to cancel early. There is no contract. You pay in advance and you dont have phone bills throughout the year... If you dont like the service, we understand. VOiP may not ever be as reliable as the old fashioned phone service. People that are not interested in new technology may find that the savings are not worth it. Others love it. I am sure that as time passes, Sunrocket as well as other VOiP companies will grow stronger and the service will become more reliable. You really have nothing to loose, but if you expect to have your standard phone service for a fraction of the price through your cable or dsl... you may be disappointed. Or you may not.

The price is good. The quality of the line is Ok we hear echo sometimes, I have FiOS (Fiber) 15/2, so speed is not an issue. The support is very bad. It takes them hours to try to solve a problem and then they escalate the case to 2nd tier!! Which acc