netTALK Duo WiFi review: it may save money…. when it works

As all families do, we want to save money.  The phone, internet and television, had all been on one provider.  However, we didn’t watch enough television to merit the full package nor use the landline enough for the cost.

The first item to tackle was the landline.  I asked some friends on Facebook about what VoIP phone service they used.  A couple of them said that netTALK was good and that it did the trick.  Foreshadowing 101, whenever a story starts out, “I asked some friends on Facebook….”  you know the story won’t have a happy ending for the first person.

I purchased the netTALK Duo WiFi, downloaded the software and plugged it in.  Immediately I received a dial tone, new phone number and all of the proper lights, except for one, were lit.   But, I could make and receive phone calls, so it was working well enough for me.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t the one who was using the phone.  My wife works from home several days a week and needs the phone to conduct meetings.  After one day of using our new VoIP telephone service with netTALK she said that she couldn’t use it anymore because it kept dropping calls and had too much static.

It was then that I also noticed that one light wasn’t working on the device.  Every time I turned the computer on the icon on my desktop would say that the device was unplugged.

Oh, I’ll just call their customer service and have them assist.   After going through the automated menu I was put into a queue where I  was the 43^rd person in line.  That’s a long line, but I had to fix the device so I chose to wait-2 and a half hours later I finally spoke to someone.

They told me to try something, I did, but it still didn’t work.  Their English was too accented and I couldn’t understand them, so I said I would try again to fix it. I continued to try to ‘fix’ the device and finally gave up.

2 months later my wife still needed to use the phone.   This time I was going to call customer service again and insist that they fix the issue.  I was on hold for 3 hours, finally spoke with a technical service person who did fix it!

All of the lights were lit and the phone calls weren’t dropping.  However, the phone quality was horrible and had a 4 second delay when we spoke with someone.  After doing a bit more research online it turns out that the netTALK device doesn’t work too well with some routers and even when it does often has an echo.

Some of the tech sites I read said that there were ways to mitigate the echo by doing this and that.  But, by this point in time I had grown too frustrated with the netTALK  Duo WiFi and decided to cut my losses.  If 6 hours on hold for their customer service, multiple more installing/uninstalling the device and days between them responding to me via email or tweets weren’t enough to fix the problem then it’s just not worth it.   In doing this research I also checked out the reviews on Amazon for the netTALK and many of them reflected my experience, both in poor phone quality and sub standard customer service.

Bottom line

It’s affordable, but the voice quality is poor, their customer service is horrible and there are too many similarly priced options for VoIP service to recommend the netTALK device.  Save your money and get another device.