There is no question that SR is growing very fast. The result is that the system they have in place occasionally can't keep up and that tech support is slow to respond. It is, of course, a very good problem to have if you are the owner(s) of the company, but that is small consolation to those who have inconveniences, however minor.
The business model is sound and basic service comes with the best feature set of all VOIPs, so the future of this venture looks bright, as evidenced by recent investment from very reputable capital firms (Doll is considered an investment guru.) The growing pains can be a "pain" at times, but I agree that some of the outages I would not know about were it not for threads on dslreports.
Moot, the problem here is that there are VOIP companies who have already gone through their growing pains for the most part (i.e. Vonage) or are hardly growing and are therefore better able to keep up with voice packet movement. The measuring sticks are services who are "Mom and Pops" with little growth push or growth stagnant providers like Broadvox Direct, a service that is looking to get out of consumer VOIP altogether. Due to lack of growth these services are able to stabilize the system to the point that uptime has been reported as decent to very good.
Phone service is such that folks want to be able to take dialtone for granted. For me, I have personally experienced very few problems. Still, uptime has to be improved to the level of other VOIPs. Occasional problems are expected with VOIP, but they are and should be every once in a while. SRs rapid growth has caused a few problems with some people. The VOIP market has exploded this year and from what I was told SR is about to unveil business service and an "under $10" 500 minute service (probably for the holiday season.) It is important for uptime to be on par with other VOIPs (especially Vonage) to keep customers who after all have been lured with expensive advertising and free hardware.
We are all big boys (and girls) here, and whoever does not have adequate backup to their VOIP lines in form of cell or a no-frills "measures" landline has not paid attention to the quirks of VOIP. I will save over a grand a year compared to what I used to have (Verizon,) and with referrals the picture is even better. I am willing to live with a few quirks and some outages for that kind of unexpected financial windfall into the family coffers. To keep things in perspective I have taken my wife to 3 delicious dinners courtesy of SRs referral points, ordered family related products online for free and as a family we are travelling to Europe in the Spring, helped by the savings. Even with occasional problems that may make it necessary for us to go to Plan B (cell backup) for a short while, my wife would not want to reverse course and go back to Verizon under any circumstance because of what the move to VOIP has done for the family finances.
That said, I can't imagine that SR does not put everything into place to make uptime stellar and provide failover. Competition springs up everywhere and many would switch as soon as another service offers similar features at the same or better price, using a very similar business model, that is if they are dissatisfied with any part of the service. From what I understand SR is revamping tech support to be more responsive and thorough and they are building a redundancy system to avoid unnecessary downtime. Reason is, of course, that Word of Mouth is the best advertising and customer retention is key to long-term viability as a company.
SR is and has been an excellent service and I would not switch, but there is room for improvement on some levels. If they are smart and get the few areas in which they can improve tightened up this year they will emerge as the most serious indipendent competitor to Vonage before next summer.
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