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Review by PDE 
UPDATED: 1.8 years ago
member for 2.9 years, 61 visits, last login: 9 days ago
 Brooklyn,Kings,NY
 Contract price not specified.
 "Excellent call quality and reliability, good personal service, good price"
 "online bills don't reflect actual billing, unlimited calling plan has limits"
 "Great service, quality and reliability with a few amateurish glitches and misleading advertisement"
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Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
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I've had this service for a month now and can report the following:
1. Very easy to set up. I had a few problems because I had my own hardware (I'm a total ignoramus with VOIP btw), but I received immediate help when I called tech support.
2. Tech support answers the phone in 2-3 rings with a REAL person. They're very friendly, quite competent and helpful. After Lingo's apalling service, this feels envigorating.
3. Had a small glitch with double ringing signals but received advice on this board that immediately solved that. The problem in no way affected call quality or reliability though.
4. Call quality: I'd rate it 8.5/10 simply because I've experienced twice that there is a very slight distortion in the voice. I've so far talked for 1200+ minutes and this has happened twice. I hung up and dialled again and it was fine. I use it for calls in the U.S., to Europe (Sweden, U.K., germany) and Taiwan/Hong Kong and works very well.
5. Unlike Lingo, there has been no downtime at all. So far, excellent reliability - especially compared to Lingo which was often would require that I reset the box after downtime.
6. You can use a softphone too which is great for travel
7. No year-long contracts, although if you cancel within 6 months it will cost you $25 - very reasonable in this industry.
8. Their online billing does not work well. The bill does not reflect the actual bill! I called about this and was told that I just need to add up the minutes to know what the bill will be and that they are working on a solution...hmmm. Very amateurish in my opinion. my first bill for example, had $20 as a setup fee and 9.95 shipping and handling when in fact I didn't buy an ATA from them. It should be 24.95 setup fee. they assured me that the charge would be accurate, but we'll see.
9. Their webpanel is really ugly and rudimentary and is in desperate need of an interface upgrade!
10. Their unlimited plan is not as unlimited as it seems. Read their user agreement carefully and ask them questions. I was told that although it says in the agreement that there is a cap for unlimited calls, 2500mins on consecutive months, that "..there are a lot of users who go over that and are not charged..." That's not very reassuring and I hope that there will be change here so that unlimited really means unlimited. Having said that, it appears that most VOIP providers do the same thing, except don't disclose what the limit is, except for saying that they reserve the right to cut you off or charge you if your calling habits don't 'fall within what is reasonable for a residential number'. That's ridiculous. Hope people complain more about this misleading advertisement - perhaps to the BBB...
Summary: I'm very happy with this service in most ways. It works perfectly, call quality is good, it's reliable and you get to talk to a real person quickly when you call customer service/tech support. The unlimited plan is very affordable but time will tell if there is a problem with their limited unlimited policy. If there is, I will immediately discontinue the service as I feel that it's a matter of principle not to call something unlimited unless it is truly unlimited. Besides that caveat, I highly recommend galaxyvoice.
Update, October 17, 2005:
Today I had my first bad experience. I tried to call a friend in Germany and kep getting a message that the call could not go through. Finally, when I got through, the call quality deteriorated beyond acceptable and when I tried to call back I got the message again. I was also told by a friend on the west coast that my voice cut in and out a little. I will monitor this and update accordingly. I hope it's just a one-time occurence. Other than this, the service has continued to be excellent.
Update, November 21, 2005:
I got rid of my old cordless phone and replaced it with a new panasonic 5.8ghz and feel that the quality of my calls has improved further. I also no longer have any problems calling Germany, though I doubt that has anything to do with the phone itself. All in all, the line is stable, call quality is excellent and there have been no outages. Their online usage and billing is still completely wrong and can't be relied on for anything, but I have found that at the end of the month the bill I get is accurate and reliable. My main wish would be for galaxyvoice to make an effort to completely revamp their web portal as it is is about 15 years behind the times! Seriously, it's terribly bad and needs a site doctor badly.
Update, December 21, 2005:
Had some problems this week with incoming calls not going through or disconnecting. A few times people got a mesage that our number was not a working number. Call quality seemed worse than usual too. I called support and, as usual, got a real person within a minute or two who was very courteous and professional. We did some troubleshooting while I was on my cell phone and he made some adjustments at his end and then called me on my voip line to test it. We thought we solved the problem, but after I hung up the phone started acting up again so I called back. Same positive experience again: got a real person within a minute who tried to transfer me to the first guy. When the first guy's line was busy he came back and offered to help me instead. He fixed the problem in about 10 minutes and then told me that he'd be there until 9 in case something happened again. The phone works perfectly again and I didn't need to call back. It's really wonderful to actually know that there are people at the other end who are willing to help and who seem genuinely interested in solving the problem instead of just passing ther buck. It's unusual. Galaxvoice is not perfect by any means, but I continue to feel that they offer a very reliable, good quality service at a great price. The remaining issues I have are: website interface, online billing information inaccurate (although the bills are correct) and sometimes their silence suppression cuts out wanted sounds when they're very low volume.
February 14: For a few hours the other day, calls wouldn't go through to numbers in Europe. Other than than, extremely happy with the service still. I feel it's a true bargain in today's market.
March 17, 2006: no problems whatsoever with any calls or service outages. Everything working perfectly still. Happy.
June 5, 2006: Everything working perfectly, No outages, excellent call quality on all calls domestically and to to Europe. Still happy and actually quite impressed with the consistently good service. Very reliable.
Update, OCtober 11, 2006: the service continued to be excellent. However, the company that supplies the VOIP service for galaxyvoice started offering a feature that allows you to call a number from your cell phone and access your home voip line for free calling out. Since I'm often away from my home phone this is is a great service. I asked galaxyvoice when they would offer the same service and they had no plans to and could not say. I feel that galaxyvoice is excellent but it doesn't seem interested in competing or trying to add new services - it just is what it is. I switched to www.revos.com (the voip provider for galaxyvoice) and am even happier! It's the same service but directly from the mothership. this means that you pay a little more, but get even better service. Voice quality is the same. I also kept a number with galaxyvoice just for the sake of it and since it doesn't cost more than a few dollars/month. I have the dial-in service and use it all the time for calls when I'm not at home. Couldn't be happier!
Followup comments:  voipfima
join:2003-05-29
Boxborough, MA | voip2go is available from galaxyvoice Hmmm. I am with galaxyvoice and I am using the voip2go. It's available from the login page. | |
| | PDE
join:2005-09-19
Brooklyn, NY
 ·GalaxyVoice
| Re: voip2go is available from galaxyvoice That's interesting and annoying.It was available for a little while and I asked them if it would cost anything. They said it was only trial and that they had no idea if and when they would offer it and that it could stop working at any time - which it did a few days later. I tried to press them for more information, but they didn't give me any...oh well. | |
| | PDE
join:2005-09-19
Brooklyn, NY | since I kept one number with galaxyvoice, I just checked the features panel and there was no voip2go option so maybe you set it for your number and then they removed the interface but it's still working...? | |
| | | voipfima
join:2003-05-29
Boxborough, MA | Re: voip2go is available from galaxyvoice Still works, however I did confirm it is no longer availabe in control panel. Can you let me know if you find out anything? Thanks! | |
| 
kylep610
@verizon.net | dont put money in2 galaxy i had galaxy voice for a while.... dont waste your time... i went right to the source. Visit »www.pulsevoip.com and you can get ReVoS VoIP Service (the people behind galaxy) for a lot cheaper. | |
| | PDE
join:2005-09-19
Brooklyn, NY
·GalaxyVoice
| Re: dont put money in2 galaxy said by kylep610 :i had galaxy voice for a while.... dont waste your time... i went right to the source. Visit » www.pulsevoip.com and you can get ReVoS VoIP Service (the people behind galaxy) for a lot cheaper. Well, I thought they were EXCELLENT while I had them. However, they did not want to offer the new revos features in a timely manner so I did switch to revos just so I could have the mobile VOIP2Go feature. Revos is the same, though a little more expensive - $25 instead of $20 - but works just as well. | |
| ebruce
join:2001-12-04
East Falmouth, MA | REVOS and Caller ID with Name Noticed you switched to REVOS. Does the Name part of Caller ID work with them? | |
| | ryan22030
join:2007-01-21
Fairfax, VA | Re: REVOS and Caller ID with Name name part of caller id-- no. but do note that revos.com is not allowing signups at the moment-- you can only signup through a dealer such as www.pulsevoip.com or www.volarity.com | |
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