Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

At a recent conference, I spoke with some people who reminded me (unintentionally, perhaps) that it's all too easy to criticise, especially in the blogosphere, and that reviews should be balanced with a degree of fairness where possible. It's just easier to dash of a harshly critical review when you're angry with a company or a service, but harder to make that effort to publish glowing praise when the service performs adequately.

Since I'm at the six month point with Sunrocket, I thought I'd take a moment to update this review, since I haven't touched it in months. Once I had taken care of my initial installation and support issues, the service actually ran very smoothly, more or less. In general, service was reliable, and I've experienced some drastically improved support on the occasions when I've had to call in, so the company is clearly making some improvements in their customer support services, which was one of my biggest gripes with the initial setup and configuration.

I can remember only one major annoyance with the service recently, which was a period when calls would simply not get through, and my connection would mysteriously "drop" calls as I picked them up, or the voice quality would drop to unuseable levels. Support was helpful and fairly prompt (via email), and I didn't have time to implement all of their suggestions / tests before I noticed my service had improved back to normal levels.

Call quality is sometimes as good as a POTS line now, often just around cell phone quality, which is very acceptable at this price point. International calls have a tiny lag sometimes (I call India once in a while) but it's not a major problem. This coupled with their major improvements in support levels makes the company much more palatable, and I believe I would stay with Sunrocket even if I was a normal or heavy phone user. Voicemail continues to work perfectly, and being able to receive voicemail as an audio file in my email is invaluable when I'm away from home.

My only gripe with Sunrocket at this point has nothing to do with their service or customer support, but in their marketing. There are users posting to major forum sites (including Broadband reports and on Anandtech forums) who are very clearly Sunrocket plants. These users police the forums, insisting that anyone who criticises the service is an example of an isolated case and cannot presume to make a general criticism, insisting that "no one else ever has these problems" no matter how many users post to mention problems. I was recently told specifically that no one else was experiencing problems with calls being dropped, by a user who kept insisting that I was using VOIP over a wireless connection (when was this user in my house, overseeing my network setup, I wondered?) and that therefore, my complaints / reports had no value...despite the fact that several others reported the same problem both before and after my posts. I'm hard pressed to suggest a motive for this kind of policing that isn't based on some affiliation for the company, and similar concerns have been voiced by a many other users.

This is a pity, because I honestly think these people are doing Sunrocket a disservice, which becomes more ironic if they're actually company plants. I think most people who have a problem come to a forum looking for solutions. Creating an open environment to support these users and collaborating on solutions, whether as an over or covert company representative, can only help spread a generally positive opinion of the service. Bashing these users continuously and insisting that their comments are invalid, however, merely creates an antagonistic space where users looking to collaborate on solutions are left isolated and angry...anger which is directed, predictably, at Sunrocket. I've personally been told that my wireless link is to blame for all of my complaints (not true, since my gizmo is connected directly to my cable modem, and this has been explained to my would-be critic several times), that my computers are virused and that this is the cause of the problem (not true, since I was running Debian at the time), that I have spyware (not true, for the same reason), that other computers on my network are to blame, because I have no control over what they run or how much bandwidth they're hogging (not true, because no other machines were online at the time, and Sunrocket's gizmo, sitting at the top of my network, is designed specifically to prioritize VOIP enough to make it work at the cost of available bandwidth for downstream applications). All of these accusations were made by one user, who suggested I had a language problem when I protested, and accused me of flaming him when I pointed out that he was attempting to police the forum. I question whether this is the use Anandtech was originally intended for, but more than that, I question how positive this can possibly be for Sunrocket? This area of my site receives several visitors every day looking for reviews and user experiences with Sunrocket, several from that Anandtech forum discussion. Surely Sunrocket would do better to focus on positive connections, instead of trying to shout down customer service issues?

As noted before, however, this is a point of principle, not of practice. I'm glad to see that, despite their marketing directions, they are committed on some level to improving their customer support systems, and they seem to be on the ball in addressing service failures and other network issues. In my experience so far, Sunrocket's service is actually providing a decent value for money, and I'd consider recommending it if asked.