This is here to let anyone researching the Lingo broadband phone system know how a customer feels about their service.
After signing up with Lingo I was unable to complete any faxes nor could I connect a work-related dialup device correctly. The line quality was terrible. Callers frequently complained about echoes and dropped signals. By dropped signals I mean that the person could hear everything you said except for the last word (before a pause). On top of that there were several times that there was not a dialtone. I had to reset the phone adapter numerous times just to get a dialtone. I also had several dropped calls similar to what a cell phone would do if you lost signal suddenly.
When I contacted Lingo's customer support via their website e-mail (24hr response time according to website) it took them four days to get back to me. I followed the directions to allow for a configuration change on my phone adapter and was still having all of these problems and more. On top of that they wanted me to ping about ten sites to see if their routing was the problem. Sorry it's sure as hell not worth the hassle.
On top of all this they charged me $39 to disconnect so you see they make more money in the short term to have you disconnected. My feeling is that they really don't care if it works right for me because they make their money anyway. It all sounds like a great deal in the beginning at $19.95, but it is all a scam in my opinion.
My recommendation is to stay as far away from this company as is humanly possible.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: If your sentences get cut off on the last word before a pause, then make the 'last word' in each sentence be 'pause'. i.e. your sentence, "How are you today pause" (then pause for reply), "I am doing fine, thank you pause" (then pause again for reply). So all you lose is the 'filler' word 'pause' each time. It is a crummy work-around I know, but it would do the job. I've never heard that particular complaint about VOIP before. I have heard that speech gets broken up sometimes, if the pipe is to full at the moment, unless you do like Vonage recommends, and use their router which tries to throttle other machines on the stream at the same time.But regards the $39 to disconnect, that's one reason that Vonage does _not_ have a current, usable credit card of mine. In the event I run out of 'next month free' coupons and have to start actually paying for the service and decide it is not worth it, then to hell with them getting any disconnect fee from me. PAT]