Why Sometimes You Gotta RTFM (Read The ****** Manual) AKA Why Vonage Doesn’t Really Suck
So I just got around to updating WordPress to version 2.5. Let’s hope I didn’t foul things up.
(I agree with Krunk…there needs to be an easier way to update WP. It didn’t help that WSFTP kept throwing up left and right. I had to create folders remotely first, before I could upload the new WP files. And don’t tell me that there is a setting in WSFTP that allows a user to transfer non-empty folders; I am fully aware of that, and never had a problem with the transfer of non-empty folders until today.)
Anyway…
Quick-hitters:
- Oh no! Between my sister and me, we have over $30 in ECBs expiring on the 17th, and there is absolutely nothing worth buying t his week or next! What to do???
- Somebody help me. I have Hunter’s song (from The Office) stuck in my head!
You took me by the hand
Made me a man
That one night
You made everything alright!
Argh!
Again, a one topic blog!
- So I’ve been a Vonage customer for about eight months now, and how can I put this nicely? The service stinks!
Well, at least I figured the service was garbage. I was able to make outgoing calls at a 20% success rate—one in five!—and incoming calls were a crapshoot at best (so much so that I started forwarding calls from my Vonage line to my cell phone.) I figured the problem had to lie either with Vonage, or perhaps Time Warner was messing up my phone connection. All I knew was that I was paying $24.99, and then $14.99, a month for a virtually useless phone line.
(Remember: I had a one year commitment, which was necessary to claim the $300 Circuit City card, as well as the $175 rebate on the Linksys PAP2 Phone Adapter.)
Recently, the Vonage line got so bad that I would get nothing but a busy signal, no matter what number I called. I decided that enough was enough, and began troubleshooting. I logged in to my Vonage account, and under Features…Bandwidth Saver, I lowered the sound quality to the lowest setting. That didn’t seem to do a damn thing.
I decided to log in to the PAP2 to see if there was some setting that I could fiddle with to fix things. I had to log in to my WRT54G router to pull the PAP2’s IP, and that’s when I decided that I would assign a static IP to the PAP2.
(Tangent: For some reason, I’ve never had luck with port forwarding and DHCP. For example, my secondary computer would always pull an IP of 192.168.1.110, but uTorrent would often report that the ports I left open for that computer were not so. it was only when I manually assigned the IP of 192.168.1.110 did port forwarding work properly.)
I logged in to the router, and saw only a couple of pages, one of which was asking for WAN info. Thinking that it wanted my IP info, I didn’t bother with that page, and looked through the other pages for anything to tweak. I found nothing, and that’s when I decided to read the manual (!!!).
(Manuals? What do we do with manuals? We throw them out the window! After all, I have techno-joy! ;-).)
I found that the DHCP could be disabled via the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) menu, which could be accessed by dialing **** on a phone connected to the PAP2. I dialed ****, entered the command to disable DHCP, and heard a broken “Invalid Command.” I tried again, and got the same broken message.
I hung up the phone, and noticed the “Phone 1″ light on my PAP2 shut off. I turned the phone back on, and heard something along the lines of “This line is not set up for Vonage use.” ARGH!
I accessed the IVR again, checked the status of DHCP, and found that it was, indeed, disabled. OK…I then proceeded to manually enter the IP, subnet mask, and gateway. I hung up the phone, picked it back up, and heard another error message: something along the lines of “Your adapter cannot register with Vonage’s services”.
It turned out that the PAP2’s IVR was about as good as most companies’ IVRs; in other words, they all stink. Too bad I couldn’t scream “OH MY F***** G*D” at the PAP2 :P. It took me seven or eight tries to correctly input all my information.
While browsing through the manual, I figured out that I wasn’t forwarding my ports correctly. Apparently, there are four port ranges that need to be forwarded: More importantly, I was supposed to use UDP and not TCP:
Set up port forwarding on your router. You must specify that four port ranges be forwarded to the IP address of the Phone Adapter. These four port ranges are as follows: 5060-5061 (UDP), 53-53 (UDP), 69-69 (UDP), and 10000-20000 (UDP).
After forwarding all ranges to the new IP of the PAP2, and changing the protocol to UDP, I picked up my phone, and immediately heard a dial tone! I placed a call—FYI, I had been using WaMu’s customer service # as a test call throughout—and immediately heard the WaMu recording! Finally!
The moral of the story? Don’t throw your manuals out of the window…unless you can find PDF copies :P. Let’s just hope that the service continues to work well.
Until next time!