Former SunRocket users still suffering

A group of former SunRocket VoIP subscribers are still suffering the ill effects of that company’s demise, as the transition to new VoIP operators has been bumpy.

At the center of the problems suffered by an unknown group of users is Teleblend, one of the VoIP players who stepped up to offer service to SunRocket customers. According to a number of Teleblend customers, their VoIP services suffered an outage this week and have not recovered.

In addition, a small number of former SunRocket customers who chose to move to Packet8, the VoIP service offered by 8X8 Inc., found the phone numbers they had ported from SunRocket to Packet8 were ported to Teleblend without their knowledge, rendering their services unusable as well.

According to Nehdi Salour, vice president of network service delivery and support for Packet8, the calls started coming in Wednesday, and in total about 22 users found their numbers had been ported to Teleblend. The initial assumption was that these users had started to port to Teleblend but then changed their mind too late for the number-porting order to be stopped.

“Some of these customers indicated they never contacted TeleBlend and never had any sort of relationship with Teleblend,” Salour said. “We are investigating with our underlying carrier [Global Crossing] to see if there was an LOA [letter of authorization] from the user in place when these numbers were ported.”

Teleblend officials did not respond to an interview request.

Salour said the customers’ numbers have been restored to the Packet8 network. Huw Rees, vice president of marketing and sales at 8x8, said his company doesn’t plan any further action against Teleblend, unless they see an ongoing pattern.

“I’m not sure we’ve seen deliberate intent yet,” he said. “This may be a mistake. If it was a consistent problem over the next few weeks, we might do something but assuming this is nipped in the bud, we would not pursue it further.”

Meanwhile, other Teleblend customers remain without service, even though the company’s Web site now says an outage earlier this week has been restored. Teleblend initially blamed that outage on Global Crossing, but issued a statement Wednesday exonerating its underlying service provider of any blame.

Marc Kruskol of MJK Public Relations in Van Nuys, Calif., said today in an email message that he is still unable to get incoming calls via Teleblend, even though the company is saying everything is fixed.

Based on Web site postings, other customers are having the same problems. In some cases, however, the users seem to be overstating the case. One poster claimed “hundreds” of Packet8 customers were being ported to Teleblend, and that Packet8 is asking its customers to file complaints with the FCC, something Salour and Rees say is not true.