I’ve had Vonage for just about three years now. Over the past year or so, our phone line has probably been down more than its been up (the miracle of technology). I’m not ready to blame that on Vonage, however, since the adapter itself appears to be on its last leg. While trying to reconfigure it a few weeks ago, I realized that the integrated switch (it’s a combined router\/switch\/VTA device) was no longer working. I also noticed that the device was inordinately hot, so I’ve chalked it all up to hardware problems initiated by overheating.<\/p>\n
In the hopes of salvaging our home phone, I ordered a used VTA device from eBay. I didn’t think twice about it; it’s definitely not the first piece of technology that I’ve acquired second hand, let alone from eBay, and I’ve had very few problems with any of it.<\/p>\n
Of course, I made the assumption that Vonage would allow me to activate a used device. That was apparently not only a naive assumption, but also a fatal one.<\/p>\n
As chronicled in various parts and pieces here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and probably many other places, Vonage apparently refuses to reassociate the MAC addresses of their VTAs<\/b> (unless, of course, it’s been “reconditioned” by them).<\/p>\n Did I just buy a paper-weight? I’d be more than aggravated.<\/p>\n Obviously, as most of us know, this is purely an artificial limitation imposed by Vonage<\/b>. Why? Are they worried about people recording the MAC address, selling the device, and then cloning it to steal calls? Do they get a little bonus for selling new devices? I have no idea.<\/p>\n The worst part, however, might not be their refusal to reuse a device. I could live with that, had only I know before<\/i> I spent money on something that’s (currently) useless. But even with a bit of searching, I can’t find a single warning from Vonage on the dangers of buying used. I can describe this as nothing short of irresponsible, almost criminal.<\/p>\n So the moral of the story is, and I’d say this in big bold, emblazoned letters if I thought that it would somehow get it more exposure across the interwebs: whatever you do, don’t use Vonage. Erm, I mean, don’t buy a used Vonage device<\/b>.<\/p>\n Like the good deviant I one day hope to be, I’m currently in the process of attempting to clone the MAC address of my previous adapter on the new one. The device supports twiddling with the MAC address, but, once I changed it, has been unaccessible (at least from work via the various SSH tunnels I have going). Yet if I delete it’s DHCP lease from the router it immediately reacquires one, so I’m thinking it’s caught up in some endless reboot cycle after attempting contacting Vonage. I’m going to keep digging.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve had Vonage for just about three years now. Over the past year or so, our phone line has probably been down more than its been up (the miracle of technology). I’m not ready to blame that on Vonage, however, since the adapter itself appears to be on its last leg. While trying to reconfigure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,25,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hacks","category-rants","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/andrew\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}