VoIP woes..

Sunday afternoon, the VoIP suddenly went dead.

All of the tweaking and resetting in the world didn't resolve the problem.

Since I had to fly on Sunday evening, I had to just leave it and head to the airport.

When I returned home, still no service. A call to tech support reveals that my VoIP carrier majorly screwed up. Somehow, the MAC address (The device ID) of my VoIP gateway was now seemingly assigned to someone elses account.

So, clearly it would no longer work with my phone number.

Tech-guy opens a trouble ticket, and says he will look into getting it resolved ASAP, but it could take a day or three. Ugh.

So, Monday morning I changed the house wiring, once again, back to the regular phone line, and left the VoIP gateway to flash a red "out of service" light.

Monday afternoon, still no service, so I call to check on the status of the ticket. I get an arrogant tech support guy who was either having a bad day, or was just incredibly impatient and short.

He advises it could be up to 5 days for me to get my service restored. WTF?

A few hours later the tech whom filed my trouble ticket on Sunday evening called me back on my cellphone to checkup on my account, and service status. No service on my VoIP yet, but hey, at least someone at customer service cares.

That was nice.

This morning, the service is restored, and my VoIP works again. Unfortunately, my DSL service is on and offline repeately through the day, not only screwing up the VoIP usability, but also destroying our internet connection, causing all of our computers to pop on and offline every 2 or 3 minutes.

Very annoying, my wife reports. I can understand.

And again, this afternoon, out of the blue the Primus tech support guy calls me on my cellphone again to checkup on my account, and advise me that the problem has been resolved.

This is sort of unexpected, and again appreciated.

I return home tonight and change a few pieces of hardware, trying to resolve the connectivity issues. No improvement, I try changing to one of my spare DSL modems, thinking perhaps the (clearly used) one that my new DSL provider sent was pooched.

Still no improvement, our connection is still going on and offline.

Then I figure it out.... Seems I had removed one of the DSL line filters on our living room phone when I swapped the house to "Full VoIP" last. When I undid the changes, I forgot to put the filter back on.

The living room phone was playing havok with the DSL connection.

Ok, I feel incredibly stupid now. Since I put it back on, the connection is solid as could be.

Duh. Double Duh.

So, the VoIP is back, and the DSL is solid.

I'm going to be calling Primus tommorow and bitching about my first week of horrible VoIP service, and see if they will credit me for the VoIP service to date.

They'd better be willing to do so. If it hadn't been for the customer service rep who took an interest in my account and took it upon himself to follow up with me over the last few days, and expedite the repairs, I would have probably been boxing up their equipment tonight and returning it ASAP.

However, I'm going to give it another chance.. But we're at two strikes now.

Three strikes, and they're out.