Just recently Gizmo Project announced its Gizmo5 beta, a service that allows users of mobile phones to place calls for very low rates through a MIDP Gizmo client. A data connection is required just for setting up the call. In other words, the idea is that you pick a contact (or dial the number you wish to call) and then Gizmo calls that party and calls you back on your mobile. You pay for the call via the regular CallOut credits.
Now, I thought I’d give this a try. I had about $0.20 in my account and given the price of the calls to landlines it would have cost me about 4¢ at most to try it out. Sadly, it didn’t turn out this way. While my phone was supported and I downloaded and ran the software just fine, the calls never successfully completed. I tried placing four or five calls to my landlines at home, none of which were successfully completed.
Nevertheless, the calls were charged to my account to the amount of 19¢, leaving me with $0.01. While trying to add credit to my account I realised that the Gizmo store did not accept Paypal anymore. Scouring the forum and the support pages left me even more perplexed: the support pages indicated that Paypal was a supported payment option that should be available at checkout. The forums gave the impression that there were continuing problems that had been — at some point — fixed, only to reappear later.
After contacting Gizmo Project regarding the issue I got the following response, which I provide here for posterity:
Hello Sir,
We are aggressively trying to resolve our issues with PayPal as the issue is on PayPal’s side. Unfortunately, I do not have an expected date of resolve for the PayPal issue at this time. I apologize for the inconvenience and understand that you and many of our other customers have a PayPal payment preference. Once the issue is resolved, we will enable the PayPal payment option on our site again.
Thank you for using Gizmo Project. We value your business.
Thank you for your patience.
Sincerely,
SIPphone Customer Care
Similar issues had inflicted Skype in 2004 and it, too, had taken several weeks to remedy the situation. Their responses were much less courteous to their customers and their subsequent one-card-per-person policy was — at best — a clumsy way to remedy their fraud problems.
Still, Gizmo, contrary to Skype in 2004, is fighting a losing battle against other SIP providers and Skype, now the dominant player in residential/casual VoIP telephony. They cannot allow such issues to affect the everyday operations of their customers in such a competitive market.
The lack of Paypal and Gizmo’s inability to rapidly restore it as a payment option, as well as Skype’s similar issues three years ago along with their crash in mid-August 2007, no matter how small, are tokens of how fragile the dependence on such providers can sometimes be. This fragility and the need for a true competitive market further reinforce in my mind the need for net neutrality and services that would make it easy for consumers to rapidly switch providers in an adhoc manner. Services that would maximise consumer freedom and power.