»next review in page
Review by jeje 
Posted: 3.5 years ago
member for 5.9 years, 375 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago
 Huntsville,Madison,AL
 $8 per month
 "Best deal for calling France flat rate, supports ATA, Asterisk, softphone, etc."
 "Limited support (forum and email)"
 "The best deal around for unlimited calling to France"
| Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
|
After using Lingo for 2 years, and using the service mostly for calling France, it was getting difficult to justify going through the increase in price of the service when other alternatives were popping up. I was paying around $22 a month when I noticed that Wengo.fr started a service with unlimited calling to phone numbers in France for 7 Euros/month. The per min rate to other European countries I called on occasions is pretty good as well (0.8 cents of euro/min ~ 1 cents/min).
I then switched to Lingo, asked for the free Wenbox Ethernet (a ATA from Bewan). It took me at least 3 hours to get the ATA working being my Netgear router. The ATA was shipped with a very old firmware version, and none of the online installation guide were talking about updating the firmware. After searching for ideas, suggestions, solutions, I finally found a post in the Wengo forum about where to download the latest firmware, and voila!, things worked greated starting at this point.
Wengo.fr provides you with all the SIP configuration parameters. They provides you with a softphone as well, so you can use your Wengo service from your laptop when on the road. You can also create a free account online, and then call your Wengo number from your PC for free (great way to call home from hotel when you travel). If you are in hard-core VoIP stuff, you can setup a VoIP SIP PBX like Asterisk. There are lots of information on the Wengo forum on how to do that. I used it this way for a little bit, but this was overkill for my need, compared to using the Wenbox ATA.
Some side notes: for some reasons, using the Wengo SIP service with other ATAs (like the Grandstream ATA286) has not been working good for me.
The Wenbox from Wengo is the first ATA I have used that required me to add some port forwarding in my Netgear router. My Grandstream ATA on the Nikotel service, and my Azatel on the Lingo service both worked great behind my router without having to configure anything what so ever... Not a big deal, but Lingo could most likely do better in this area. In addition to that, earlier versions of Asterisk did not work with Lingo. A patch found on the Wengo forum was necessary to makes this work good. As of now, the official Asterisk code works fine with Wengo. I have been able to use Asterisk@Home with no patch with Wengo.
If I compare the sound quality of the 3 VoIP providers I have used so far, I would most likely rate Wengo as the lowest of the 3. But the sound quality is still acceptable, and given the price (1/3 of what I paid before), I am fully satisfied. The quality of the sound could just be that my cable Internet connexion does not have a very good route to the IP->Phone gateways used by Wengo.
Followup comments: | Forums » comments on review of Wengo |
 |
Wengo
