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Review by NGOwner See Profile

  • Location: Leawood, Johnson, KS, USA
  • Cost: $11 per month (24 month contract)
  • Install: about 1 days
Inexpensive, feature rich, good quality voice. Inexpensive international rates
Long TechSup Chat waits, website feature management is poorly designed
Will save me about $275 over two years over Lingo
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

I'd been with Lingo for over five years before finally pulling the trigger and porting away. With taxes and surcharges, my monthly rate was about $28.50 per month. I went looking for a way to reduce that charge. A friend had PhonePower, and had no complaints. So I investigated.

The primary reason I had Lingo as my VoIP provider was due to its unlimited calls to Europe. I needed to take into account that any switch to a metered provider would have to also now include a variable component to cost.

After crunching the numbers, assuming that our usage remained comparable (I went back 6 months with Lingo to arrive at an average monthly International usage figure), I learned that I could save about $275 over 24 months switching from Lingo to PhonePower. We selected the $199.95 per year (with the second year free) plan. Taxes on that plan amounted to $38.31 for the first year. We’ll be charged a similar amount at the beginning of the next (free) year. What happens after that, I don’t know. Also we ordered the PhonePower retail package from Frys which got us the computer adapter for free. And the referral credit was issued to our account very quickly, so that part works well.

That savings would not make any difference if the service was unreliable, or lacked quality. Frankly, the gold medal rating here at BBR for PhonePower made the decision to switch much easier, and as far as I can tell, is well deserved. I have had no issues to date with PhonePower from a quality or reliability standpoint. The switch was seamless.

Two things I was delighted about. First, the billing cycle date started once the port went through, despite having outgoing service a week before the port completed. That was a nice touch. Got something for nothing. Second, their call block feature is very easy to use, very effective, and very absent from Lingo’s feature list.

These are the only two drawbacks to PhonePower I’ve run across. First is Tech Support. There are problems with the length of time it takes to get someone on Tech Support Chat. They don’t seem to have enough agents, the wait can sometimes be 45 minutes or more. Once it even rolled to an error message when it then became my turn. But when I do get a Tech Support agent, they know their stuff and get things resolved quickly. The one time I used email support, the request to fix Remote Click to Call was submitted at 10AM on a Monday morning, and the response came back at 4:30PM the following Thursday. They may have fixed my problem (way) earlier than Thursday, but I don’t know. When I checked after receiving the email, it was working correctly. Second is their web management. Their forwarding rules are a bit cumbersome to manage and configure. There’s no reason for that.

All in all, I’m happy about the switch.

member for 23.3 years, 4687 visits, last login: 4.1 years ago
updated 13.1 years ago