UKVoIPTalk.com

Gradwell are a very professional company and their chairman, Peter Gradwell, very committed to good service.

So why after 2 years am I moving back to a standard BT business line?

One word - reliability. In terms of price and features Gradwell wins hands down over plain old telephone service ( POTS ).

But over the last 2 years I've had just too many issues with VOIP and to be fair they are not always down to Gradwell. Sometimes routers and firewalls seem to just have bad days and need a re-boot. Sometimes the phone I use ( an expensive Snow 360 ) plays up. Sometimes my Internet supplier might be to blame.

However there have been plenty of times where Gradwell have been to blame. For example a customer calling and instead of being transferred just hears a dead tone, or a "Sorry this number is not available" message.

For me reliability is so very important. Because I don't check my own number on an hourly basis, I can often find the VOIP has been down for a few hours without me knowing - meanwhile I risk losing customers.

It got to the point where I'd phone myself every so often from my BT landline to see if the VOIP was still working!

The other problem, for a small business like me which is very, very busy is that I don't have time to fault find the VOIP service. Typical scenario:

1) Customer emails to say can't call me
2) I call myself from BT landline and discover VOIP calls in not working
3) I re-boot the phone to see if that helps - rarely the phone that is the problem but I know it's the first thing Gradwell will ask
4) I re-boot my firewall/router to see if that helps
5) I call Gradwell. Engaged - I call again - engaged. I send an email - no reply for a while to I call again - get through this time
6) Explain problem to Gradwell support. They say it must be my equipment - "have I rebooted my network?" - "YES". Is my Internet having issues? Well I can surf the net ok but I guess it could be the issues so I go and do more tests...
7) Test internet - working fine. Call Gradwell - engaged. Call again - get through. He says he'll do some tests.....


Anyway this process loses me maybe 3 or 4 hours, in addition to the phone downtime. Often in fact I find the problems resolve themselves after a few hours so I tend not to bother calling unless it's down for more than half a day - each time I swear I'm going back to a plain old BT phone line!

Well now I am moving back to POTS. Boring, little in the way of features and more expensive but it's reliable!

In fairness to Gradwell I think maintaining a 99.999% reliability is very, very hard. Plus while it can be hard to get through sometimes, when I do they are always very polite and helpful. Plus they are UK based so no need to learn a new language when contacting the call centre!

Also their chairman is very good and will reply to personal emails - few managing directorss will do that!

If it was more reliable I'd be sticking with VOIP and Gradwell.