I am a recent Fongo home phone customer, using a pre-programmed Grandstream HT701 ATA purchased directly from you. The service is working well for me, but I'd like to respectfully suggest that the assistance provided to customers of this particular service could be a bit better.
By this, I don't mean the actual availability of customer service. I've contacted them twice, first to order the product and second to start the number porting process. In both cases, my hold times were minimal and the customer service reps were quite helpful. What I mean is the focus of the available help features (both online and via phone) needs to include customers who are paying for the pre-configured ATA and home phone service, and not just those who are coming aboard with their own hardware.
My impression of Fongo is that the majority of users are people who are fully prepared to roll up their sleeves and figure out how to do things themselves. They learn about the service by tinkering, and by doing so they end up answering most questions themselves. I think that people like me, who have paid for the pre-configured hardware, may be falling through the cracks a bit in receiving the information they need.
In my case, I started the Fongo service with a temporary phone number so I could test the service out before porting my existing number and making a firm commitment. The porting process went fine and was completed quickly... but on the day it was done, no one told me I would need to re-program my ATA and replace my temporary phone number (which was already programmed in when I received the device) with the number I had just ported over. It would have been quite easy to mention this in the email which informed me the porting process was complete. As well, some online info in the FAQs would have alerted me to this ahead of time and I would have been ready to do this myself when the time came. As it was, I only realized something needed to be done when I discovered my phone was dead, and finally figured out the solution by poking around in these forums and reading a document that showed the advanced configuration info for the Grandstream ATA. In just seconds, my phone started working again, but it took me about 90 minutes of tinkering with my ATA and router to get to that point.
I don't mean to sound excessively negative... I'm enjoying the service, and I'm saving $15/month over the Vonage service I used to use. Fongo's service is more basic, but the frills it has are, realistically, ones that most people could be expected to use, so I'm happy to pay for features I'm actually using (and not pay for cool things I don't really need). I hope these little growing pains with your new service can be corrected with some updates to the online FAQs and in the emails sent to customers.
Best,
BM