One third of VoIP users need support

PC Magazine has a telling survey on VoIP reliability and user issues in the US market. According to their latest "Trustworthy Tech" survey nearly one in three VoIP customers required tech support for their service. To be precise the industry average was 29 percent with their readers favorite, Cablevision's Optimum, also having the lowest support rate of 18 percent.

Twenty seven percent of Vonage users surveyed said they had required tech support. AT&T, Time Warner and Comcast all had service requests running at around 33 percent. 

Service calls are both costly to support--just ask Vonage--but more importantly remain the single biggest impediment to more rapid deployment. If 30 percent of early adopters are getting troubles, what will the rates be when the moms and dads begin to sign up and the voice modem suddenly needs to be reset using a paper clip!

Significantly Skype's PC-to-PC service had a very low 6 percent of users who required tech support. The tech-support numbers doubled when readers Skyped from a PC to a standard phone but Skype's numbers continue to be better than the average for VoIP.

More Reports:
- PC Magazine VoIP survey results [1]
- Support the issue with VoIP Report [2]

Related articles:
- Mini Skype outage Report [3] 
- Cost, quality of VoIP worries enterprise Report [4]