Intelafone

Intelafone is a Voice over Internet phone service (VoiP). The company changed its name, briefly to ObiTalk, and now it is known as Vestalink.
We were customers of Intelafone for over a year in 2012 – 2013. Setting up the service was straight forward, glitches were few as we used the service, and they had good telephone tech support the few times we needed it. Around the first of the year, 2014, they merged with another company and made some other changes which caused one problem after the next.
First, we began having trouble getting through to local numbers, and incoming calls began going straight to voice mail without ringing. Then the phone stopped working altogether. Tech support explained that somehow our account had been dropped from their server during the merger. We were told to go online to their website and sign up as if we were brand new customers. It wasn’t quite that easy as, now, we had a phone number we wanted connected to our «new» account. It took a few days for them to get our old number onto our «new» account, and there was a weekend, too, so we had no phone service for about a week. Plus, they billed our credit card multiple times for our «new» account, but finally we got things worked out.
About a month later the phone stopped working again. No calls in or out. Dead line. We called Vestalink and got a voice mail message saying they no longer offer phone support, email them if we have a problem.
This started several days – 7 hours one day! – of the most exasperating and tedious effort to communicate by email with their staff; we emailed a description of the problem to them. 20 – 30 mins later we’d get a response. We’d clarify something they misunderstood, 30 minutes later we’d get a response. This went on and on. They were giving us, often incomplete or inaccurate, highly technical advice about what we needed to do online to get the phone working again and to get our old number re-​connected to our line.
For example they told us to go to a specific portal online, and enter certain info. Except they didn’t mention that we needed a user name and password to get into THEIR portal. We went to the portal and started to do what they said, but found we didn’t have their username or PW. We emailed them again, waited 20 mins, got wrong info about the username and PW, tried them, they didn’t work, we emailed them back to say the info was wrong, we waited 20 mins for a response, when it came it said «I think this other username and PW might work» etc. etc. Then it was 5 o’clock, they stopped responding to our email, another 24 hours with no phone service.
After four days with no phone service and two days of this excruciatingly frustrating email back and forth, with no resolution, plus no reason to believe that our phone service wouldn’t get dropped again in a few more weeks, and no hope that we would get timely and useful assistance if it did, we cancelled our account with Vestalink.
Intelafone was a good company with a great product. Vestalink is a complete disappointment with no apparent interest in customer satisfaction.