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Review by OmagicQ See Profile

  • Location: Bakersfield, Kern, CA, USA
  • Cost: $5 per month
  • Install: about 1 days
Inexpensive dids, 6 second billing, higly customizable
Nothing I have found so far
Solid voip provider with lots of features
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

*** Update 8/29/2011 ***

I've completely consolidated/migrated all my voip usage to voip.ms. My days of running a sort of Rube-Goldberg-Voip-Machine are over. The novelty of using a did from "provider A" and outbound from "provider B" with some "provider C" mixed in is over. I've experimented with a number of providers in the last 2 1/2 years and the combination of features and flexibility provided by voip.ms meets all my current needs and likely my future needs as well. Occasionally a server goes down or there's some other issue with the service but its fixed as quickly as possible and doesn't impact me very much when it does. Instead of multiple points of failure I'm reduced to a few that are easily addressable via support ticket to the staff. I still have back-up accounts, mostly because I don't want to bother support over refunding the small balances and free sip accounts whose credentials are archived but relatively unused. The best commendation I can give is this: I prefer using their service over everyone else's, free or paid.

*** Update 05/21/2011 ***

Still working out great for me. I've started using a few more of their features with no issues. I was able to get a more memorable number for my business directly from voip.ms that will be cheaper in the long term. I have my business and home line as sub accounts and I love the feature to be able to customize the incoming caller id. Both lines ring when either has a call so I can pick it up on either line and I know if its business or not. Recent changes to the their site has made it easier to configure and manage the main and sub accounts so i upped the website rating.

*** Original Review ***

Please bear with me if this seems very long. I have had an account with Voip.ms for months now but it was unfunded and back then I got it mostly out of curiosity, to see what people on the forum were talking about when they would mention a feature. On December 23rd, after thinking it over for some time I decided to fund the account. This wasn't a quick decision, it was a combination of factors that finally motivated me to switch to Voip.ms. I have been using my Google Voice number for business calls. Instead of wondering how long it would keep working, If the service would disappear or become unusable I decided to take control of the number by porting it to a voip provider.

Localphone, which I have been using for residential phone service, does not port in numbers as far as I can tell. I had already tried companies like Callcentric and Future Nine, but living in California with a voip provider in New York or Florida was undesireable. I did not want my calls to have to cross the continent twice. People can say what they like about latency and call routing and that it really doesn't matter where the provider is (local or out of state) as far as call quality goes, I have to go with my own experience on the matter. I am very satisfied with Localphone because they don't proxy the audio (at least not with my setup), so the audio doesn't take a trip around the world even though they are based in the UK...So then what other provider could I use?

Voip.ms has servers all around the country, one happens to be in Los Angeles. From my own exploration of voip and internet service, I know my connection to the internet usually leaves the AT&T network in Los Angeles or San Jose. There are probably other points where AT&T peers with another network for internet but I haven't mapped them out. Voip.ms has a server in the same area that my internet passes through. Pings to the LA server average 20ms, a traceroute is around 9 hops, 5 of those being on AT&Ts network. They do proxy all audio, but its mostly transparent to me because audio would be coming through LA anyway. Another thing is that I wanted to get a tollfree number that would match my Google Voice number as much as possible. I was able to get an 855 tollfree that matched, so once my Google Voice number ports I will have use and control of them both for the foreseeable future.

Update: I was unable to port my GV number to voip.ms at this time.

With Voip.ms 6 second billing, you talk for 30 seconds you pay for 30 seconds. CNAM lookups are inexpensive. The DIDs are also inexpensive. All of the ones I have except Inum are per-minute with reasonable rates. They are business calls anyway so I can write them off as a business expense. I'll keep Localphone for my residential calls. Separate accounts will make accounting easier (clear separation between home and business). I've handed over more money to Voip.ms in the past two weeks than any other provider previously....mostly for porting and custom tollfree fees. But I think that is a sign of confidence, I am trusting them to provide me with reliable service for my business calls. I am slowly getting used to all the features that Voip.ms provides. It would have been overwhelming if I had tried them when I was first learning about voip.

My only issue is a common issue. Voicemail doesn't respond to dtmf sent inband. I use inband on my ata to prevent voice from triggering the dtmf but then the mail system doesn't recognize tones. So I made a sub account to use on a softphone I can configure to use RFC2833, so I can check voicemail.

UPDATE: I had the dtmf setting wrong in the portal, I changed it to inband and now *97 works from the phone and recognizes dtmf

In summary, so far my experience with voip.ms has been positive. Calls sound great, I haven't experienced any down time yet. Lots of features, very customizable. They are the perfect fit for my current needs, and I suspect they will be perfect for my future needs as well since I can always make sub accounts and IVR and voicemail boxes etc. Setting up an office full of phones wouldn't be that hard.



member for 20.4 years, 1229 visits, last login: 2.5 years ago
updated 12.5 years ago