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Review by NefCanuck See Profile

  • Location: Mississauga, ON, Canada
  • Cost: $8 per month
Low cost, excellent tech support
Website confusing, no mobile friendly option
A good alternative to POTS
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

Writing this review at roughly the two month mark of using VoIP.ms.

After finally cringing while opening my monthly Bell POTS bill (Last full bill was $52) I chose to explore the world of VoIP service.

I selected VoIP.ms as my provider for a number of reasons, chief among them was the fact that it is a Canadian company and I could use my own ATA device (In my case a Bria softphone on an iPhone 4) The port of my Bell # to VoIP.me was fast and without hassle.

ViOP.ms has servers spread throughout Canada and the US (with a European server location as well) which appealed to me both for redundancy and for when I travel in North America (their website, though initially overwhelming, does make it easy to switch servers as needed)

The VoIP.ms website initially looks very confusing and although they do provide a wiki to explain it, I did have to make use of the tech support to help me understand how the voicemail system worked (the tech was excellent by the way, professional and prompt)

I went with the unlimited incoming and premium routing option because I wanted to be as sure as I could be that I could both get Caller ID on incoming and show proper Caller ID on outgoing calls and that I had a handle on the monthly costs (I make very few outgoing calls while at home)

The ability to filter and deal with incoming calls has been a godsend and I can honestly say that it brings a joy to my heart to send telemarketing spammers straight to voicemail without even being annoyed by the phone ringing once.

Forwarding calls to my cell phone on the weekend while I'm away from home works as expected as well.

Call quality on my 5mb/800kb home connection is usually perfect, mobile VoIP use is hit or miss though (blame my cell provider Telus for that)

If there are any suggestions I could make, a mobile device friendly version of the website would be a top suggestion, it would make it much easier to make changes while on the road if a server goes down etc.

UPDATE: August 8/14

It's been a long time so I figured I'd post an update, some equipment changes on this end (Including adding Zoiper software so I can make calls from my PC as well) and a faster DSL Internet connection (first 25/7 and now 25/10 as provided by Bell Canada)

Service has been for the most part steady, while there have been glitches but VOIP.ms has been good about emailing customers when issues arise (this is an opt in service, I would recommend it)

The website is still not my favorite part of the service, but since I use it so rarely (last time I used the website to make any serious changes was in 2013 to change my POP while I was vacationing in Japan) and still doesn't have a general release mobile friendly website (There is I believe a beta mobile site, but I've never used it)

I also do teleconference calls from home for work and there have been no complaints about the call quality from my end that weren't as a a result of the audio mixer hardware I have attached to my PC.

member for 16.7 years, 4278 visits, last login: 193 days ago
updated 9.6 years ago