Gee, What’s A Poor Broadband User To Do?

Friday, May 17th, 2013 at 8:18 AM EST

By Stuart Zipper

As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end, and the special “loyal customer” discount I’ve been getting on my broadband service – over which my Phone.com VoIP is carried – has ended.

Century Link had been charging me what I admit is a rock-bottom $20 a month for 12 Mb/s service, with a modest upload speed of less than 1 Mb/s. Suddenly, the company wants to more than double that, to $50 a month. Alternately, for another $10 a month, I can jump to 20 Mb/s a month service (which by my math is $720 a year).

But what’s a guy to do? The only competition at this point is Comcast. Now the cable company is offering me 20 Mb/s for just $30 a month for the first six months, jumping to $45 for another six, and then to $63 after that (in other words, $756 per year). Now obviously, counting on my fingers, that means I’d be paying Comcast $450 the first year, which sounds good except for the little asterisk that says “plus equipment, installation, and taxes.” And finding out how much that will be in advance is like pulling teeth from a duck.

I have a feeling that many of my readers are facing the same quandary, and from conversations with a lot of people, I find that they’re taking double, triple or even quadruple play packages because of what’s become a fairly outrageous price for those who buy just one service from one of these giant companies. Indeed large corporations, which buy enough bandwidth to dictate their own terms, don’t face that kind of pressure, but small businesses and residential users certainly do.

Now I should explain that I have no real interest in paying for TV shows, so out go the deals that include cable or satellite TV. (It’s not that I’m anti-TV. I have a home theatre, get dozens of digital channels over the air, have lots of Blue Ray and DVD discs (and even some old VHS tapes plus a player), and watch stuff over the Internet regularly from several different sources.)

And I have no interest in a landline telephone. Gosh, that’s why I use Phone.com! So there goes that bundle opportunity. And although the competing broadband providers would love to see me sign up for their VoIP services, the simple fact is that, for the price, Phone.com offers far more features and flexibility for a small- to medium-size user at a far more attractive price.

As for throwing in a cell phone, I simply don’t use the right mobile carrier for such a bundle here in Denver (and I do have one of the latest 4G LTE phones, by the way).

So there go all the discount bundles.

Ah, what to do … if anyone has a suggestion, please send it my way …

Customers Can Now Block Number Patterns

Thursday, May 16th, 2013 at 7:12 AM EST

The Phone.com spam caller list is a wonderful feature that allows customers to block calls from specific numbers. This feature just got better! You can now block call patterns, which includes blocking an entire area code. Here’s a step by step guide on how to block a number pattern. For the sake of an example, let’s block all calls from area code 325.

Step 1: In your Phone.com control panel navigate to “Call Info” and then to “Manage Spam Callers List”

Step 2: Click the “Add A Number To Block” button.

Step 3: You will need to check the “Starts With” check box. You can then enter “+1325” which will block all calls from numbers beginning with 325. The note field is for your reference. Once you have completed that, click the “Add” button.

I told you it was easy. If you have any questions whatsoever regarding this new feature, our awesome customer service representatives are here to help 24 hours a day and 7 day a week!

Jeremy Watkin is the Director of Customer Service at Phone.com and co-founder ofCommunicateBetterBlog.com (and on Twitter: @commbetterblog ); a blog dedicated to learning about good and bad customer service with the intent of providing awesome customer service for Phone.com.

Conference Calling With Phone.com

Tuesday, May 14th, 2013 at 9:40 AM EST

Conference calls seem to be a necessary part of business today.  In days of yore calls consisted of 2 phones, 1 on each end, sometimes there’d be a speakerphone or 2 involved but that was it.  When a group of people had to talk they’d have to meet face to face, this was prior to the Phone.com Communicator app of course.  Now though when face to face isn’t necessary but getting a group together on a call is we just use a conference calling bridge.

Phone.com offers the best bridge in the business.  Features like 500 seats on the call, flexible moderator controls and one that’s really nice if you have regular calls, a permanent conferencing number.  That static bridge means you can save the number into your address book and not have to ever dial it again.

I’ve included 2 pictures, one of our participant controls and one of the moderator controls.  If you have any questions or comments please feel free to give us a shout on Facebook or Twitter.  We’re here to listen and help.