Access One, Inc. Talked us into VOIP without telling us VOIP does not translate faxes. Refused to check problems, blamed on machine and internal system, later discovered untrue. Chicago, Illinois

Switching to Access One was the biggest mistake our company had ever made. First, the salesperson neglected to inform us that their VOIP services do not work well with fax lines, and we were not receiving a material percentage of our faxes. Fax is the way we receive and follow through with the majority of our business. Of course, we did not realize the severity of the situation until a few months following installation, when our fax numbers increased and the percentage of failed faxes went from over 10% to over 50%. We called Access One on numerous occasions to look at our lines, and each time they responded that they did a "remote line check" and everything was ok, and that the problem is coming from our fax machines. So, we had our fax repair company come and take a look at the machine, and were told there was no problem. However, Access One insisted that it had to be our fax machine, so we signed a lease for a new fax machine. We even had our internal phone vendor take a look at our internal phone system, and were told there was no problem.

At this point we were losing a huge percentage of business, and our current contacts were extremely frustrated with us as well, because they would have to try on multiple occasions to get a fax to go through. Somehow this got worse with the new fax machine. That's when we learned from the Internet that VOIP and faxes did not work well together. This was something Access One never told us could be a cause of our fax problems. We informed our original salesperson at Access One that we would like to switch over to POTS lines, because their VOIP does not translate our faxes.

Once the conversion to POTS lines occurred, our problems somehow worsened. Our fax lines would be down for entire days. Every time we called Access One (and we called multiple times daily) they would say the remote line check worked out fine. Again, we called our fax repair and internal phone vendors and both physically came down and vouched that their equipment was fine. Access One still had done no more than say a "remote line check" turned out ok. By this point, we had lost thousands (even tens of thousands) of dollars in business.

Finally, we were able to get an AT&T repairman to come take a look at our lines. It turned out that the whole thing was indeed Access One's fault. They forgot to switch something during the conversion process. It could have been so simple if anyone came by and took a look at our lines, instead of ignoring our serious problem.

Currently we are paying as much if not more for our telephone services as before we signed on to Access One, because we needed a separate account for our fax lines, which were originally part of the VOIP package. Additionally, when we tried to explain our losses to Access One, they refused blame and instead of even apologizing or trying to revive the business relationship, they had their legal counsel offer us what amounted to 1/2 a month's service, so long as we do not pursue the matter any further. We just don't think that this is very fair.