Don't Get XO for VoIP

Tonight I was having a telephone chat with long time pal Jeremy Pepper, who recently left the dark side of PR (he was with an agency) and joined the brighter side, which means he's now on the client side of the business.

I've know Jeremy since he quarterbacked some of the moves Skype made when he lived in Phoenix. He was one of the first bloggers I started to follow, as his perspective on PR and Social Communications seemed very much aligned with mine.

Fast forward a few years he's now at Boingo, a company I like to cover and he's moved to L.A. after a stop in San Francisco. We were catching up, talking about his new gig and poof, the call dropped. I called back and a few minutes later the same think happened. Then again. So I switched from AT&T CallVantage and went with my PhoneGnome line whose long distance service runs over Junction Networks, a client of my agency. Poof. Same thing a few minutes later. Then twenty minutes more the same thing happens. HMMM.

Jeremy let me know XO is the provider. So, based on this I won't be recommending them to any one ever again.

Comments

[Craig Plunkett]

Without doing some deeper analysis of the path between the endpoints, its a little unfair to automatically blame the last mile provider, which might be the ILEC, if it is XO's DSL. Once a quarter, one of the Covad lines that I run one of my hotspots off of gets screwed over, and it takes a day of fingerpointing between Covad and VZ to resolve it, and I'm never sure if its a DSLAM or an upstream router issue. Your problem could have been a peer somewhere in the middle. You didn't describe any of the troubleshooting you did with any other apps besides VoIP between you that might have provided a smoking gun. You might well have been right, but it seems awfully glib to shoot them on reflex like that. I couldn't really give a rat's behind about XO, either way.