VoIP Gateways

While most people will claim that VoIP-based phone lines are saving them money, one business owner says his switchover to VoIP is costing him hundreds of thousands of dollars. The problem for this particular business owner, who has taken his complaints to the social messaging site Reddit, is that the VoIP phone line he had installed through AT&T (News - Alert) never worked.

Despite the fact that the line didn’t work, AT&T charged the businessman more than $216,000 for the week that he was not able to use the VoIP service. The problem first cropped up in March and the owner of the business, who thought he would be saving a ton of money has been doing battle with the phone company ever since.

Most offices are turning to VoIP services to handle their phone needs, and most of them never see any sort of problem like this pop up. That doesn’t mean that these kinds of issues are impossible, however. In fact, this story is a bit of a cautionary tale for other businesses looking at Internet-based services for their facilities.

The business owner claims that the VoIP line that he had installed and that never actually worked was somehow hacked. That is how the service rolled up more than $210,000 worth of charges. While there hasn’t been any movement from AT&T since the problem first popped up, the person who owes this money says that the issue might finally be coming to an end.

During the Reddit posting, showing a bill where the company was “nice enough” to shave about $1,500 off the original bill, the businessman said he had received a letter from AT&T’s CFO saying he was looking into the matter. Other posters say that the CFO is probably not actually looking into the situation, but that AT&T does have another tier of customer service to deal with issues like this.

Should the businessman be able to get rid of the bill, it could be an indication that social media can help people out when they run into problems like this. Getting an issue like this widely publicized can pressure a company into taking another look at an issue when they would otherwise be inclined to go by the book.