I recently switched one of my land lines from Vonage to Cablevision's Optimum Online. It's not that I have anything against Vonage, or particularly like Cablevision, but the pricing is slightly less and the one year discount on my cable TV service was several hundred dollars. It was leaving money on the table not to take them up on their offer.
I called up their sales desk, who cheerfully took my order. When I explained I wanted to port my Vonage number, they said they could not do it today, but would have to schedule with Vonage. That wasn't a problem, but then they told me that a technician would have to come to my house the day of the transfer. Cablevision *loves* to roll a truck for unnecessary reasons (like slipping a cable card into a TiVo), so I figured this was just their own craziness. But then the rep said that if I was not porting a number they could just turn it on there. This, of course, is just plain stupid - all this takes is for them to do the switch and me to plug my household system into the cable modem rather than the Vonage VoIP adapter. But it was nearly midnight and I didn't want to fight them at that time.
The day before the install, I got a friendly reminder call. I really did not want to take the morning off to wait for a guy to come in, pick up my telephone and say "Yup, it works". I called customer service and got a similar tale as before - that they had to send a tech. When I asked why, the rep said "The technician comes out with a cable modem programmed for the telephone number." That piece of bullshit was the final straw. I told him that didn't make any sense, and would like to talk to a supervisor.
We played a little scene where I had to wait on hold for 20 minutes, and then got told a supervisor would call me back. No problem, I wear a headset, so I can sit on hold and still work for hours at a time. Eventually, I did receive a call back. I explained my situation to the supervisor, and he told me I still needed a tech visit. When I asked why this time, I got an answer I could work with - he said that the technician would have to rewire my phone system. I explained that there was no need for that. I already had VoIP service, so all that was needed was to unplug the phone system from the Vonage adapter and plug it into the back of the cable modem. He paused, and pondered for a few moments, as he had an epiphany. He asked me to hold for a few minutes while he checked something.
Sure enough, a few minutes later he came on the line and said - "No problem. I'll put in the service change for midnight tonight and it should happen soon after. Just switch the plug and check it in the morning. It's a good thing you figured this out, because with the snow tomorrow, you were almost sure to get cancelled in the morning." I thanked him, did a little victory dance and went back to work.
That night, I swapped my phone system input to the cable modem. In the morning, I had dialtone. All is right with the world.
