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Ask HN: Why do VoIP vendors hate their customers?

5 points by PaulHoule ↗ HN
I was trying to get control of my digital life back from Verizon, Skype, etc.

I got an account with Twilio and have gone through at least five different softphone programs, none of them really work correctly.

Some of those programs (e.g. Zoiper 5) suggest a list of sketchy-looking vendors, maybe they work better than Twilio, but the domain names look scary, the web sites 404, etc.

Why is that anything based on open standards seems designed to exclude people?

11 comments

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scott31
What exactly are you asking?
rapsey
They are competing with free and that is a hard business model.
jploh
Lots of dinosaurs. Old enterprise/corporate thinking. Source: I'm employed by a VoIP vendor.
orastor
My first turn off when I wanted to do this was how I couldn't use the phone number in most websites/app because they checked it for being a "virtual number" and other names.

I've had some of this with my google voice number too but it has gotten much better recently (before I couldn't even use it with Signal), however I'm not sure what the state of using twilio for this is.

dsegonds
I used Twilio as my main phone number for quite a few years. Most recently, I used them in combination with 3CX. It was quite alright for voice but was never able to text message properly from my cellular phone. In the end, I ported the number out to a small cellular phone company. I still have an offshore number that my family can call and which is routed to my cellphone.
jhart99
If you are interested in using a VOIP for a landline, that you get either a dedicated phone like a Cisco IP phone or something like an obihai ATA. Once you get it set up, it will just work. For mobile, you can just add a VOIP number as a separate provider in an Android phone and just select the line as needed. Calls coming in will ring your phone as normal and you can make outbound calls by switching the number in the phone app. No secondary app needed.
jdeibele
Get a Google Voice account. You can lock a Google account down so that you must use 2FA to login and the 2FA must be Yubi Key or an authenticator app (Google Auth is OK, Authy is better). SMS can be removed after you set up 2 other ways to authenticate. They urge but don't require a second email as backup.

There's no customer service to social engineer.

BrandoElFollito
> Google Auth is OK, Authy is better

Why is Authy better? (I use Authy for years now and like its synch capabilities, but security-wise it is the same thing)

> There's no customer service to social engineer.

:)

bryanlarsen
There's not a lot of margin selling a consumer product with its support issues for a couple of dollars a month so I don't expect a pretty web site. I've been using and happy with VoIP.ms for the last decade.
marklyon
voip.ms has provided an amazing amount of support for such a cheap service.