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SunRocket has painted themselves a "No Gotchas" Internet phone service with a bottom line price. I have to admit, no taxes, no fees, and a monthly charge of $24.95 a month has its appeal. I’m already a Vonage customer, and their monthly fee is $24.99, but the fees and taxes take the price over $27.00 a month.
SunRocket also has a few features that Vonage doesn’t have. Enhanced 911, call blocking, "follow me" service, and the ability to have voicemail notification to email, cell phone, or even instant messenger. As a bonus, when you sign up, SunRocket gives you a 2.4 GHz dual handset cordless phone. So, I signed up with SunRocket to give them a try.
It took a week to get the "gizmo" (that’s what SunRocket calls it) and the cordless phones. I had the package shipped to me at work, so I was able to charge the phone at work before hand. When I got home, I hooked up the gizmo to the router of my network at home, connected the phones, and got a dial tone. Easy. Simple. It would take another 10 days or so for inbound calls to work, but at least outbound worked.
I gave a handset to Tina and asked he to call her brother in Oregon, which she did. According to my call log on SunRocket’s web site, a 42 minute and 42 second phone call was placed to the 541 area code on Friday the 13th of January. That was the last call made with SunRocket’s service.
Maybe it was unlucky Friday the 13th, but the next morning, the gizmo’s lights were different than they were the night before. The Voice light was out, and the Ready light was blinking steady. I tried for hours to get that gizmo working again. I tried the supplied crossover Cat-5 cable, a factory-made straight-through Cat-5 cable, hooking the gizmo directly to the cable modem without the router. I followed their instructions to the letter. Nothing worked. As router/firewall, the gizmo was working. It assigned DHCP IPs to my Linux box without fail. I could access the config inteface of the gizmo. I could surf the Internet with no problems. But I needed the voice service to work. So, I removed the SunRocket gizmo, and reconnected the Vonage adapter.
Jump ahead two weeks to this past Friday the 27th. I took the gizmo to work and with the help of my boss, set things up to see if I was missing anything. He hooked it up, and just as before, was able to access the ‘Net and the config interface, but no voice. He set it up with a static, public IP address and asked me to call SunRocket tech support.
The first tech I talked to had a thick Indian accent that made Apu from The Simpsons sound like a natural-born American. I could barely make out what he wanted me to do. I could also tell he was reading flash cards, or some sort of corporate support script. We totally confused him when I told him there was no cable modem to restart and the gizmo was publically accessible via the Internet. Apparently there no step in their support script for people on corporate networks. He immediately wanted to do MAC spoofing, eventhough I told him there’s is no cable modem in the current setup. I got frustrated when the tech told me to call back from home when the cable modem could be restarted.
We decided to call back about 10 minutes later and hopefully get someone with a little more experience and knowledge. No such luck. The next tech was reading from the same customer support script, and wanted to do MAC spoofing. Again, this tech was confused there was no cable modem. She said she was going to escalate the issue to engineers. She said I would get a phone call or email within 8 hours. As of this writing, it’s been over 36 hours.
I’m writing an email to SunRocket next. Maybe their trained monkeys can read better than they can listen.
Go Seahawks!
