|
Home | Reviews | Speed Test | Tools | News | Forums | Info | About | Join |
NOTE: As of March 2020 this is posted on their website: "CallWithUs has always aimed to avoid working with telemarketers, as we disagree with their business on principle. Unfortunately, this has been difficult, as the majority of recent sign-ups have been from telemarketers, creating a lot of work for us in filtering them out. To help stem the tide of unwanted calls, we have temporarily disabled new sign-ups so that we can better focus on our existing, legitimate customers. Sign-ups will be reopened eventually, please check back in a year or two." ------- Call With Us is a reliable SIP-friendly service which is my oldest VoIP provider. Strengths are value pricing, outbound calling, international calls, and for use by the PBX/Asterisk crowd. For outbound calls, the customer can choose from multiple routes at different quality and price levels. VPN access is available, as are some newer features such as Find Me, Caller ID blocking, Calling Card, and Callback Service. The North American Number Lookup is an excellent tool for looking up which LEC serves a particular phone number, and if available it also tells the CNAM. The data is updated quickly. There is a very small charge per lookup. One important policy to be aware of is that customers must make one paid call (or equivalent) every 3 months, otherwise the account is made dormant. In that case a reactivation fee of $1 applies. Their website is spartan by design, and customer service is supportive but not hand-holding. There is no porting or 911. A very good provider overall for experienced VoIP users. (Updated version of a review posted several years ago under another account). ----- EDIT December 1, 2019: CallWithUs announced that they will no longer offer inbound phone numbers (DID) themselves but as they said: "We continue support of the existing DID numbers and third party numbers forwarded to our service. Please note: you don't need a DID to make outgoing calls." It's easy to direct a DID from another provider (as long as that provider is SIP-friendly) to a CallWithUs account. EDIT January 4, 2020: Configuration instructions are posted for many common types of phones. In some cases, a STUN server is needed as part of the configuration so users should carefully follow instructions. member for 7.2 years, 1983 visits, last login: 3.8 years ago updated 4 years ago
I have been using Callwithus for a little over a year now and havent found any real problem with them when my call connects. My problem however is sometimes I try to make calls and it takes a very long time or it just doesnt connect any at all. This is the main reason I dont use them for any of my pbx installations. I use it on my own pbx however as a backup trunk and to test any issues I am having with callcentric or inphonex. 28/07/2009 update. I have to be fair to callwithus on the call delays. I revisited my spa9000 trunks and and asterisks and realised it was my dial plan mostly that was causing the delays. When I removed the choice of trunks and force each route with its own steering code, the call went through right away with reasonable quality. Based on this discovery I will be putting Callwithus further up on my trunk list and pass some reasonable traffic. I will come back with an update after a few weeks of this. 18/09/2019 I have been trying out their virtual pbx going two years now and although I was a bit concerned that it was hosted in Canada, to date I have had no quality issues. Setup was easy and any changes beyond the portal I can get support for in a timely manner. member for 15.3 years, 823 visits, last login: 1.3 years ago updated 4.5 years ago
edited 2015/11/28 First an apology- I do not give easily 100% ratings just because I like the service. Value for the money is unbeatable on small retail level. Most of the rates are highly competitive, especially the rates to European cell phones. . CWU provides some very valuable services : Calling card service, Callback,NAM number look up, choosing your CLID from your registered numbers and more. The ability to choose the routes will help you to get the best quality for the lowest price. Call quality has been so far excellent and comparable to other quality providers, certainly on PSTN routing. Reliability has been very good so far. The reason why I am giving only 75 % rating is the lack of verifiable information about geographical and personal redundancy- it's no secret that CWU is a small company. The web site needs work. Difficult to use,some relevant information is missing and I have troubles even reading the price sheets without downloading expensive software. I decided to reduce the rating to 50%. Installation was not quite easy but not too bad. Tech support good and surprisingly fast, but not perfect. A total newbie may run into issues. The incoming service is very basic and I chose not to use it. Since 2017/05/01, CWU charges 0.3c/min for calls to toll free numbers. And that's what Callwithus is- a great second choice. I do not recommend it as the only provider, but whoever uses multiple providers CWU should definitely be one of the choices. Edit 2018/08/19 CWU, like most other providers, did not find a way to bypass the termination issues in some EEA countries for people calling from non EEA areas, making some of those rates absurd. In these cases other solutions, like Zadarma, Rebtel or Twillio are preferable. Update : After 2019/05/10, this review will not be updated any more. Reason : DSL forum account closing member for 11.1 years, 3071 visits, last login: 4.8 years ago updated 4.8 years ago
I do PAYG outbound calling only. Most of my calling is within CONUS, at very reasonable fraction of a cent rate per minute. Most international toll I incur is to the Dominican Republic. Rates are competitive and once again, call quality is very close to POTS if not same. Web portal is simple and straight forward. Getting call records is few clicks away, and so is setting things up like extensions, SIP password, etc. Sergey doesn't do inbound number porting, so plan on forwarding any existing DID's you intend to keep, or outright getting new ones. There's no E-911, but he's upfront about that as well. There's no monthly fees for outbound calling provided you re-up your account with $25 or more. What you use is what you pay. I added this amount to my account back in the summer, and there's still plenty of money left. Obviously your mileage varies based on your calling habits. My only gripe with this carrier is busy signal from time to time. I've found myself unable to make a call. But this has been short-lived and sorts itself out. And when I say short-lived, I mean within minutes not hours or days. Service just works. And works very well. My hat's off to Sergey. member for 23.6 years, 10904 visits, last login: a few hours ago lodged 5.4 years ago
(06/30/2017) Still one of the most reliable and affordable VOIP providers for residential and small businesses. Great technical support. (10/12/2016) 8808 calls made in 6 years, my wife has never complained. Still the best rates and quality. (10/26/2012) Everything has been working great for about 2 year (2/15/2012) Great service and price. (2010) My wife has been using CWU as main provider for international and business calls, she has made 2650 calls during the last 7 months and she has been very happy about the quality, reliability and cost. Caller Name/ID for her business have always been working. Made over 1700 personal, business and international calls during the last 5 months with no issues, just added another $25. Technical support has been great. No issues after 3 months for a small business and for international calls. Rates are great for both US and International calls. My wife has been using CWU for a month for a small business, no voice quality or reliability issues. The best PAYG rates for US and international calls. Customer service is very knowledgeable, and very prompt (always within few minutes). Web interface is excellent, you can configure almost anything desirable for VOIP, e.g., adding sub-accounts, change SIP password, set CID for every sub-account, set max rates, length and cost. I highly recommend CWU as main or backup provider for US and international calls, for residential and business users. member for 16.4 years, 1955 visits, last login: 5 years ago updated 6.7 years ago
June 18, 2017: They've started charging for calling toll-free numbers since April, and I had to pay a $1 penalty for being dormant; therefore, I switched to Future Nine several days ago. Don't understand why toll-free isn't toll-free anymore; after all, they get paid by those toll-free number owners. Don't they!? Old review: I've been using them for a couple of years now as a back-up and for calling Korean Mobile. It just works, and it's very affordable. No complaints here! member for 20 years, 3329 visits, last login: 4.1 years ago updated 6.7 years ago
Getting started took only a few minutes. The account was instantly active. People who are curious about them can begin like I did, by creating an account for free, and then testing the service via their loopback echo test number (3246) or by calling toll-free American numbers. You don't have to put any funds in your account to test them out! The list of supported audio codecs is far bigger than what's listed in the FAQ. All of the most famous & even top-modern codecs are there! G.711, G.722, G.729, Opus, iLBC, GSM, Silk, Speex, and countless others. Modern codecs like Opus and iLBC means perfect call quality and stability on mobile 3G networks! Perfect for people who use a softphone on their cellphone on-the-go! They have servers all over the world. This means that I have super low call audio latency even though I am located in Europe (Sweden). Yes, "sip.callwithus.com" is in America, but THAT server is only used for the text-based call information. When a call happens, the actual AUDIO travels via the audio servers that are closest to your geographical location. For example, my ping from Sweden to the European CallWithUs audio server is just 29ms round-trip time (meaning 14.5ms one-way, which is how voice is transmitted). In fact, I found out that most of CWU's customers are outside of USA, and that all of them are very happy with the low latency. He even has a happy customer out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean (Cook Islands!). Super impressive! Additional details about the low latency: If you want to do your own latency test, just be fully aware that the loopback echo test number (3246) is a voice *quality* test, *not* a voice *latency* test. Due to the way the loopback buffers work, its audio buffer length will grow over time, meaning that longer test calls will have more and more delay. The best way to test *actual* voice latency is simply to dial another real phone (or cellphone) and holding both phones to your ears to check the latency. However, also remember that all cellphones have ~200-250ms of built-in latency, if you decide to test your latency by calling someone’s cellphone. In my own tests, the latency from CallWithUs to a landline was better than a cellphone-to-landline call, and the latency to a cellphone was better than a cellphone-to-cellphone call. This is true for all VoIP providers, since they go over the internet and therefore always have a bit more latency than an actual landline phone. The conclusion of my testing is that CallWithUs has *very low* latency and all calls are perfect! There are no hidden fees, and no fixed fees or monthly charges (except if you rent an incoming DID phone number of course). You simply put money into your account balance, and then you make your calls. The account balance never expires. It's very easy! The minimum payment is $5, which is a lot lower than most other services (which have fixed monthly fees or require you to refill with $25 each time). So far, I have only used the Standard (lowest-priced) routes/rates - and the prices are definitely very, very good. Even the Premium and PSTN (super-premium) routes are super affordable and I wouldn't hesitate to use them. But I haven't needed to change to the more expensive routes, because I get perfect audio quality via the Standard routes. So far I've called America, England and Sweden, both landlines and cellphones. My Caller ID information is transferred properly everywhere via the Standard routes, and the audio is perfect and very stable. It seems like the major parts of the western world have very good Standard call termination trunks via Standard routing, and I doubt that I will ever need to use the Premium or PSTN routes (probably only useful if you call a destination in the world where their internet infrastructure is very bad). And if a specific number ever needs Premium/PSTN routing, you can simply prefix the number with some extra digits to select the higher-grade routing for specific numbers (while keeping your general account setting on Standard routing). Don't let the look of the webpage turn you off. Do you look at a website when making phone calls? No, you don't. And the website offers extremely advanced control over your entire account. It is incredibly good. The user control panel is GREAT, and gives detailed control of all options and lets you see super detailed call logs (of incoming and outgoing calls). You can even create sub-accounts and set different Caller IDs for each. So you could have one sub-account with an American Caller ID and another with a Swedish Caller ID, etc. Then just set up those separate SIP accounts in your VoIP phone and you'll be able to pick the outgoing account you want, to show people the appropriate Caller ID (for instance, when I call America, I want them to see an American number so that they can call back at local non-international rates). So the sub-accounts are a very good feature! The API is also a very nice touch. It lets you query the rates for phone numbers, check your account balance, do Caller ID Name lookups, and other features like that. Very good. Sergey (the owner) is incredibly kind and helpful, and answers very quickly. Super impressive. It's true that he doesn't waste excessive amounts of words, but he always answered every question and got the point across. I recommend CWU whole-heartedly to anyone who is experienced with VoIP and has advanced requirements. This service is very tech-oriented and respects your intelligence, and DOESN'T hand-hold you with any gag-inducing, cheesy pictures of smiling, plastic-looking photo models talking on the phone (you know what I mean; like most other mainstream VoIP providers do). They are now my #1 primary VoIP provider, handling ALL of my outgoing worldwide calls from now on (including all of my local Swedish landline and mobile calls). I've canceled my accounts at all of my previous providers! Yep, CWU is THAT good! If you know exactly what you want from a VoIP provider, then CallWithUs is the perfect service for you. Amazing quality, and full of features! member for 7.3 years, 6 visits, last login: 7.3 years ago updated 7.3 years ago
The rates are reasonable/low (even if not rock bottom) and the features are excellent for my needs (CID, trunk handling, etc). The only negatives I see are the fact that PayPal payments are subject to surcharges if less than 25$ (and at their rates 25$ gives you a LOT of minutes ). Second, I noticed that lately the path between me and CWU seems to have packet loss (didn't have too much time to troubleshoot outside my ISP network) which I don't see with Anveo, IdeaSIP or CC. Nothing that cannot be figured out - just tedious. That being said, I use CWU daily for conf calls (hours) and I don't think I got dropped a single time. Bottom line, I am happy with the service and recommend them as a reliable VoIP provider. UPDATE OCT2016: Still happy with the service and I able to use CWU in situations where other providers were congested or down...so that should tell you something. member for 22.8 years, 2622 visits, last login: 25 days ago updated 7.4 years ago
20161018 - UPDATE - CallWithUs provides one of the most powerful user interfaces, but requires that you understand what you are doing. I love the KISS principle that has shaped CWU's website design and services for the last nine (9) years I have been privileged to use their services. Quality services and _reliability_ are high points. Intelligent questions are met with intelligent answers in a timely manner. 20160119 - UPDATE - See last comment as I have nothing new to add.. CallWithUs just provides reliable, reasonable services without the BS fine print. 20150812 - UPDATE - Still one of the best VoSP out there after all these years. Just _reliable_ and quality services at reasonable prices; at least for the 'roll-your-own' users. Has generally set the bar for others to match for user flexibility and features. All done without deceptive terms-of-use. 20150522 - UPDATE - Keeps giving me more flexibility, security and reliability options. All of it is provided in a simple and straight-forward presentation to accomplish any task you understand. High quality service. 20141027 - UPDATE - Yet more rock-solid features and flexibility. Still the same _reliable_ VoSP, keeping it simple and straight-forward to accomplish any task you understand. 20140215 - UPDATE - More features and flexibility. Still the same reliable VoSP. 20131004 - UPDATE - Bump... keeps taking over more of my outbound traffic just due to reliability and flexibility. First choice when another carrier's routing goes substandard on me. 20130327 - UPDATE - Bump... what else can I say? Just plain GREAT!!! 20121117 - UPDATE - CWU just keeps getting better and better, yet still maintains a simple, easy to use website. 20120522 UPDATE - BUMP. Hmm, just see my previous comments. I expect to keep using CWU for many years to come! 20111209 - UPDATE - Hmm, just see my previous comments. I expect to keep using CWU for many years to come! 20110604 - UPDATE - What a GREAT way to do business. Simple terms, rock-solid service and flexibility. 20110131 UPDATE - The real no BS deal. Even more features and flexibility as time passes, while maintaining the same GREAT service and reliability. 20101112 UPDATE - Still no BS, just great rock-solid service. 20100310 UPDATE - CallWithUs is dedicated to providing the best service that they choose to offer! Unique for their simplicity of web view, backed with solid performance. Perfect for those that like to roll-their-own systems and understand a little bit of what they are doing. Don't expect any BS or small talk. GREAT! 20091101 UPDATE - CallWithUs just gets better with age. Better prices and features. 20090407 UPDATE - The best Terms of Service and philosophy, without a doubt, for BYOD users. Robust feature support. Well-designed web site, with lots of good information and examples. Value and reliability together. 20090109 UPDATE - CWU just keeps getting better! 20080617 UPDATE - Still getting everything I expect! Great reliability, service and quality with reasonable prices. I am amazed at just how flexible they have made the services offered. ORIGINAL REVIEW: CallWithUs (CWU) is not for those seeking a standard' or flat-rate service plan. It is oriented to those who would use bring-your-own-devices [BYOD] or centralized PBX software like asterisk. Personally, I found the CallWithUs website refreshingly simple and wonderfully usable and functional! Tech support knows their business and provided insightful assistance when requested. On-line setup instructions and generous examples are great. I really appreciate the ability to choose the amount of 'risk' acceptable by using different levels of VoIP vendors supplying them with numbers. I have found that the numerical rating assigned by CWU may also reflect the expected quality and reliability of service from that 'level' of vendor. I have had no service problems since signing with them. There are no hidden government taxes or BS fees to boost their bottom line. What you see is what you pay. I find their rates quite reasonable. Their services just work reliably. member for 23.2 years, 6803 visits, last login: 1 year ago updated 7.4 years ago
Call With Us is a reliable SIP-friendly service which is my oldest VoIP provider. Strengths are value pricing, outbound calling, international calls, and for use by the PBX/Asterisk crowd. For outbound calls, the customer can choose from multiple routes at different quality and price levels. DID's are offered through the DIDX.net DID exchange, but there is also the availability of free SIP URI forwarding from other DID providers. VPN access is available, as are some newer features such as Find Me, optional inbound CNAM, Caller ID blocking, Calling Card, and Callback Service. The North American Number Lookup is an excellent tool for looking up which LEC serves a particular phone number, and if available it also tells the CNAM. The data is updated quickly. There is a very small charge per lookup. A very good provider overall. Addendum 10/10/2016: One important policy to be aware of is that customers must make one paid call (or equivalent) every 3 months, otherwise the account is made dormant. In that case a reactivation fee of $1 applies. member for 11 years, 2350 visits, last login: 7.2 years ago updated 7.4 years ago
|