I'm going to open this post and update it with my order status. I'm doing this to (hopefully) help out folks who are on the edge of pulling the trigger but just aren't sure - I tried to do research but it seems like all the voip review websites are filled with spammers paid by companies to artificially pump up the ratings or to shoot them down. As I'm a born skeptic, maybe my experience will help.... anyway:
My connection is a 4 megabit down, 1 megabit up connection provided by Spint Broad BAnd Direct. After looking at a bunch of voip companies, I decided to give Sunrocket a try because:
1. Their servers are east coast located and I generally ping under 50ms to them. I also spent a couple days doing continual pings and traceroutes and determined that the packet loss isn't bad at all.
2. Their price point is decent.
3. There is a reasonable amount of feedback on the net so that I'm confident that at least they won't take my money and run, even if their customer service is suspect.
Timeline:
-6/8 Placed an order for the $199 for a year package. The website was easy to use. It explained I can port my permanent number over later (after I confirm that this thing is going to work for me), so I pulled the trigger.
-6/8 Received email confirmation.
-6/13 Received email confirmation that my equipment has shipped. It was shipped UPS and I have my tracking number.
-6/14 Out of curiosity I called my new phone number, and it still comes back as disconnected. I wonder at what point it will be "connected" to my voicemail.
-6/14 Thanks Agrall - I just went into the configuration (through the website) and it's been recording calls since the day I signed up. I configured my voicemail. It took about 2 seconds. Equipment is due tomorrow according to UPS.
-6/15 I received my "gizmo". I did NOT receive a free phone. I should have received the free phone... that's a little irritating. I just checked, and they still have the advertisement on their web page, so I'm emailing them to find out where it is.
Anyway, I plugged in the gizmo through my router, and got an instant voip light. Plugged in my office cordless phone, and immediately got a dial tone. Dialed out, no problem. Sounds pretty darn good too. Had someone else dial in and I had no issue. Started up a download from download.com and the person on the other end said "Why are you breaking up so bad". I think I can fix that through router QOS. I'm also going to check and see if setting the gizmo up ahead of my router hurts my bandwidth at all.
Right now I'm happy - I'll come back later and update #1 if I can fix the choppiness when downloading and #2 how rapidly customer service gets back to me about where my free phone is.
-6/16 Ok. I'm beginning to see the opportunity here for someone to get really ticked off about sunrocket IF they don't have some networking skill. My phone sounded great when not downloading, but even the smallest download (20kB/s) would kill it it, as would the smallest upload. I would much rather the gizmo be behind my router, so I set to work. First, I had to get the tcp/ip address of the gizmo. Without basic networking knowledge - I'd be up a creek here. I got it by logging into the router and checking the ip assigned to the gizmo port. Then I enabled QOS on my router and set the gizmo to high priority and every other port to low. No change. Rebooted the router, no change. Put the gizmo in the DMZ zone. No change. Turned off the router's built in firewall - no change.
Ok, so maybe my router's QOS just isn't very good. So now goes the trial of putting the gizmo in front of the router and using the gizmo's built in QOS. I'd noticed before that you actually do need to follow the suggested power on procedure - power on the device connected to the internet, then work your way back to the computer powering each on after a minute or so. So I moved the gizmo outside my router, reconnected everything, and tried to access the gizmo. No go. My router was blocking my attempts. Attempted a telnet session that would connect but wouldn't accept the login/password. So, I pulled the gizmo back inside the router, accessed it via the browser, logged in, and set QOS in the upload and download banks to the suggested maxes that I see on my speed tests. Put it back outside, and turned everything back on.
It finally appeared to work without choppiness, even when I was pretty heavy on the downloads. The next step is to unhook my outside phone and try to wire up whole house service through the inside wiring. That will probably take me a week to get around to.
-6/16 Oh really..... I just received an email stating I signed up during their "3 free month" promotion, not the "free phone" promotion. Interesting then that as I stated, up till yesterday they still had the "free phone" promotion going. The invoice I have states 3 free months - but I got that on the 14th and I signed up on the 8th. This isn't a deal breaker - but I didn't get what I signed up for and that is VERY annoying.
-6/17 My wife started really complaining about voice quality when I was seeding torrents today. Back to work. I went back through the whole deal again - the QoS on my router is crap. If you read through voip forums, you'll find that the only router worth a damn that's inexpensive and has worthwhile QoS is a linksys model, and you have to update it with 3rd party software to make it work. I bought Sunrocket because it's cheap - I'm not going to blow money on a router. So, back to playing with the gizmo. It's a bit scary that the recommendation from Sunrocket is to put the gizmo in front of the router - users aren't allowed to change the gizmo password, and in front of the router it's wide open to the net. Alot of people have issues with that. But, the gizmo DOES have QoS that actually works, so that's what I had to do. Multiple tests confirm that Sunrocket voip uses about 90kb, but I've gotten much clearer service by reserving 150. Adjusting the QoS until I had clear calls was a pain, but it works fine now. Maybe tomorrow I'll wire it to the house.
-6/18 Test again today with full download speed - the QoS on the gizmo does work. It's a little heavy handed on cutting the bandwidth, but I want the calls to be clear so i can accept that. Today I unplugged my house from POT's and simply plugged the gizmo into the wiring. Instant dial tone throughout the house. My wife is using it upstairs to call right now. I also requested our POTs number be transferred. If we run into any problems forward I'll post a bit more, but right now I'm happy with Sunrocket. *DISCLAIMER* I have not had to deal with customer service, and that seems to be the largest complaint about sunrocket.
-6/21 Final update - on Fathers day I saw the 199/2 year deal and called Sunrocket customer service. They had no issue updating me to the cheaper plan. This is probably the last I'll post unless something goes screwy. For now, I'd say that Sunrocket appears to offer a good price for a good product, with shoddy customer service. For do-it-yourself folks, this is a good deal.