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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!
Man Vonage isn’t much better. I finally got tired of thier abu’s not being able to listen – I told the guy I wanted his supervisor and one that spoke english. I had to fight with him to GET a super, then the super was a dipshit too. Vonage is great and works well, what is 3 bux huh? I like that I can put the router behind mine on my switch and it works like a champ. Coyote’s load hasn’t been above .15 even with phone,azerus, and cs.
Jake: It is possible to setup the Gizmo as a standalone client on the LAN, you do not need to use it as a gateway. You can disable the DHCP server on the Gizmo and then plug the WAN port into your LAN.
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WAFWOT: Did you try a factory reset of the Gizmo?
Gizmo (AC-211) Factory Reset: With WAN port disconnected, dial ##3332858# on a phone connected to the Gizmo. Once the command is accepted, you will hear “DOT” announced over the headset and the Management (MGMT) LED on the front of the Gizmo will glow a steady green and after about 30 seconds the unit will power up with factory defaults.
A friend of mine sent me a note wondering how the Sunrocket story ended, and I realized I never finished the Tale of Two Countires.
I left it at emailing SunRocket. I was wrong. Their trained monkeys can’t read any better than they listen. The tech that emailed me back wanted me to reset the gizmo by dialing ##3332858#, something one of the commenters in my blog suggested I try. When I said there was no dial tone, the was no dial tone, no touch tones, not even any voltage to the phones. I plugged in an old corded phone, the kind without the need for an electrical power adapter. Normally when this phone is off-hook, the keypad lights up. While plugged into the gizmo, there were no lights, no touch tones, nothing… so dialing ##DEFAULT# wasn’t going to work.
I took the gizmo to work, and called India again. This time, I got a woman with an accent, but she was understandable. Maybe she was a decendant of the British occupiers of India. In any case, after I went through the whole ordeal, she wanted me configure my gizmo for MAC spoofing. I swear to God, MAC spoofing must be some sort of snake oil cure-all at SunRocket, because they push that config like dealers push crack.
Frustrated, I told the chick in India I needed to talk to someone who knows the technical workings of their magic black box that was raising my blood pressure to unsafe levels. She took my name and number, and said an engineer would call me back today. Well, no engineer called me. So I called back the next day and immediately asked to speak to an engineer. After explaining the whole story AGAIN, they directed my call to an engineer. Progress!
The first thing Engineer Boy wanted me to do was get the MAC address of my cable modem and set up MAC spoofing. Jesus H. fucking Christ! I told him there is no cable modem, and MAC spoofing isn’t going to fix the problem. I explained the I work at an Internet provider, and we’re experts at networking. I told Engineer Boy that the gizmo is directly connected to our corporate network, and there is no MAC address to spoof.
The next card he read told him to have me plug in a phone and dial ##3332858#. Holy phone-dialing hell! Is this asshat an engineer or a phone mokey pretending to be an engineer? I explained, again, that there is no voltage on the phone port of the gizmo. It works perfectly fine as a DSL/Cable router, but as a VoIP device, there’s no dial tone, no touch tones, no voltage.
He clicked away at his keyboard, giving me the illusion he was doing something technical. He asked me to try the ##3332858# code again. Again, no tones, no voltage. It’s like my own personal Groundhog Day.
Next, Engineer Boy said he was going to push a firmware update to the gizmo, which would take 20 minutes. He did some more hacking at his keyboard, and sure enough, the gizmo’s lights were blinking like mad. He said he’d call me back in 20 minutes. I thought for sure he just wanted to get off the phone.
However, 30 minutes later, I got a call the Engineer Boy. Now that the firmware update was completed, he wanted me to unplug the gizmo to reboot it. When it came back to life, I could surf the ‘Net, but there was no dial tone, no touch tone, no voltage. Simply excellent.
Perplexed, he offered to overnight a newer model gizmo to me. Of course I agreed. Goddamn, yes! He verified my shipping address, and said he would send it out today.
My broke-dick gizmo came from… Virginia, I believe… and since it was about 2:30pm when I got off the phone with Captain Brilliant, I figured I wouldn’t see that overnight package until Friday since it would have been 5:30pm in Virginia.
On Tuesday, my new gizmo showed up. Overnight my ass. The new gizmo was a completely different model than the AC-211 that was broke. When I got home, the new gizmo worked perfectly. Well, perfectly as in, it worked like the equipment was supposed to. The service, however, wasn’t so great. Dropped calls, voice breakups, echoing audio… after a few days of trying, I put the Vonage adapter back on the network. Good ol’ Vonage. For me, it’s clear, solid service… and it works quite well.
I returned both gizmos to SunRocket, but they said I could keep the phones. Sweet deal. I guess it’s the least they could have done considering the troubles I had. Too bad their service didn’t work well.
Try having their tech support troubleshooting the gizmo overseas. I bought 2 and I send 1 overseas in order to have international free calling. Well, lets just say that after 8 months, I quit trying. Unfortunately, I prepaid for the year so I am stuck. At the seventh month, the 50th person I talked with told me they do not support overseas although they wasted my time for 7 months. To be fair only 1 guy at their NOC support was helpful and actually run a trace (but to no avail).
Anyway, since both my location has Internet access I started using skype which is excellent. Bypasses most firewalls, and if you use it with the recent handset devices that link to it, if feels like a regular phone. Best of all it is free, US calls to landlines are free and international land line calls are really cheap…