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I searched for ages for a VOIP provider to replace my home service. I even played with Magic Jack for a while as most providers are still in the $20+/month range for any reasonable service. But I wanted something cheaper. I don't use the phone a ton anymore (we have email, etc for that!) and done see why we can't buy unbundled voice services where you pay for what you need. Enter VOIP.MS. I pay $1 for a DID, and pay 1c/min for incoming calls. I pay 1/2 cent for outgoing Canada calls (home) and 1 cent for outgoing to the USA -- and free to my family and friends who I'm getting hooked up with voip.ms too! At the moment I'm not worried about e911 service, but would likely add it in the future for another 1.50/month, but as it stands, $3-4/month for inbound and outbound services is plenty fine by me. We even use the time of day and IVR capabilities (free) to build a 'catch all' for calls in the middle of the night, allowing people to still push a button to reach us if they believe it's urgent, but are told that we don't take calls at night. Very handy. Voicemail works well and functions as expected, as do our other 'standard' features like call display, call waiting etc. They have a 8/10th of a penny per call name display lookup option, but frankly I don't look at that much anyway. And for people that you know or interact with often, you can add them to your phone book online and they'll show up with the name you entered. Toll free outbound calls can originate in Canada or the USA, which is great for calling US-only toll-free numbers. And although their normal service is free for toll-free calls and it works well, if you desperately need premium outbound services, you can pay a little extra per minute both for LD and toll-free calls, or independently of each other. This place is extremely flexible -- definitely worth a look if you want a new telephone provider!! member for 13.4 years, 16 visits, last login: 13 years ago lodged 13.4 years ago
EDIT: Nov 19, 2010 I've been using this service for a year now and it STILL ROCKS. I've referred at least 10 people. I have not noticed a single outage. I use SIP clients wherever I go from my laptop and it just works, no matter how I use it. I am still totally impressed by the quality of support, responsiveness, and the performance and flexibility of the service overall. Mind you: this company assumes you know a thing or two about what you're doing, which is why you get good people on the phone instead of a script reader. For that kind of user, this is YOUR service, and they keep making it better! -------------------------- Look - the value of this service is just amazing. I'm totally sold, after using the service for 6 months, and after trying 3 other providers in the past 3 years. I signed up for a Pay As You Go (PAYG) service - I keep a running balance in the account in $25 increments and the only unavoidable monthly recurring cost is for e911. Everything else is PAYG at about 2 cents per minute! I've had zero problems with the service. Only issues were configuration related, and tech support was very responsive and extremely knowledgeable. I never got beyond the first tier, and that's with fairly sophisticated issues, so - either they don't tier their support or the first tier is very qualified. The service is more configurable than any other I've tried, and I've tried other providers. I have two individual SIP logins configured, with the other available as a second outgoing line or fallback on the primary. I can use PC SIP clients from anywhere (including work) on my laptop so I can receive calls at work. I've also configured both G711u and G729a codec use, but found that G711u is most compatible with the rest of the world. SUMMARY voip.ms is the best value going. Their support is world-class. They have multiple distributed sip hosts (one near me), the feature set is incredibly flexible, call quality rivals land-line - what else is there to say? KEYS TO GOOD SERVICE (for newcomers to VOIP) With any VOIP service, the key is enabling QOS on your internal router. I use an upgraded PAP2T-V2 behind a linksys running DD-WRT. member for 14.6 years, 9 visits, last login: 13.4 years ago updated 13.4 years ago
I switched from a pots to voip for the first time ever about 6 months ago and went with voip.ms. Dropped my AT&T local only service (with NO features) from $20 to less than $5 with Voip.ms (with tons of features - too many to name!). I have had zero disappointments and really like the features. The few times I have had questions, I use live chat or a support ticket and I get taken care of fast. I would fall in the category of low voip knowledge, but had no problems buying and setting up a phone adapter. Voip.ms provides all the instructions to get set-up. If you can follow a recipe, then you can set yourself up on voip.ms. By the way, telemarketer calls have dropped significantly! You can block out entire area codes from calling you if necessary (as was in my case). I am now going to port my business number to voip.ms and happily pay the $25 to do so. member for 13.9 years, 22 visits, last login: 13 years ago lodged 13.4 years ago
Needed a DID in a rural area. Voip.ms had what I needed at a really good price. Easy to purchase and instant activation. member for 19.9 years, 261 visits, last login: 11 years ago lodged 13.4 years ago
Hello, I am not technically inclined, just regular user of different VOIP services. What bother me with VOIP.ms is that I got incoming caller ID number all wrong. I have decided to keep my cell phone number and transferred it to VOIP.ms. I got two more cell phones one for US, one for Canada, few phone numbers I use for business, they are with three VOIP providers with different features and pricing. Yet, I want to be reached by my old number, so I opened account with VOIP.ms and now I transfer all calls to one of my phones. Everything is good except one detail. I am getting caller ID on incoming calls completely wrong. No right numbers. So frustrating! My intention was to use this set up for business as well. Now I am thinking of shopping around for something more predictable and reliable. Anyone has had such a problem? VOIP.ms does not deny the existence of problem, yet they did not fix it since my first call about it in March 2010. They simply do not know what is going on, I guess. Open ticket, close ticket. Try this, try that.... I am not software tester, nor quality engineer. I do not have such problem with other providers. Thanks, Alex It's the problem not only with VOIP.ms. I have transferred my number to Phone.com and the same problem still there. I guess something is very wrong on Canadian side. member for 13.5 years, 10 visits, last login: 12.1 years ago updated 13.4 years ago
Excellent service and support. Very friendly guys responding either, chat, email or ticket support system. Services PAYG with BYOD, the best I could find over here. Using DID's (CID - CNAM and e911 compliance), IVR feature, forwarding, Routes, Voicemail to email, SIP and reports, everything going reliable and flawless. The only thing they need to be a complete solution for small business is a Virtual Fax service. All the features are superior than other carriers, and they just charge for the minutes used at very competitive rates. (no hidden charges for the lot of features included). Very well recommended! Danny M member for 13.4 years, driveby review (so far) updated 13.4 years ago
UPDATE: voip.ms took a while to fix my routing problems, but in the end, they were fixed. (For now.) I continue to use them and consider them my favorite provider. Because of their tenaciousness in fixing my problems, I have increased my tech support score to maximum. It took them a while, but few companies will pursue a problem to its resolution if it is an odd problem. -------------------------------------- I really want to like voip.ms. I really do. The prices are excellent (dare I say too good?), the customization options are awesome (even if the website is less-than-pretty and confusing for beginners), and the PAYG is great for me. And 95% of the time, things are smooth as butter, but... Sometimes things don't go right. I have a AG-188N ATA as well as 5 different soft-phones for my iPad, and I have been searching for quite some time for a combination that is bomb-proof, but there just doesn't seem to be one. Where to start? Connections: Sometimes (1 out of 20 calls, maybe) when I call or receive a call I can't hear the other person or they can't hear me. Sometimes the call is fine for several minutes and then one party gets dropped. I have keepalives turned on on my softphone (Groundwire). Most of the time resolving the issue is as easy as hanging up and calling back. Occasionally when I am in a call the call will suddenly go haywire: the call will start sounding garbled, or one party will suddenly not be able to hear the other. The phone will not recover, and I have to hang up and call back. This mostly happens over 3G with a soft phone, but it has happened a couple of times with the hard phone too. I want to blame all of this on Asterisk and say maybe voip.ms should switch to Freeswitch, but isn't everyone else using Asterisk? Then there are the problems with my DID. I had it ported from my cell phone, and for nearly a week at one point I was getting, "all circuits are busy at this time" messages when I tried to call it. I asked voip.ms for help, and though normally very responsive, all they said was, well, we can't see a problem - try again. A week later, everything was working again, but there was no explanation as to why the problem happened in the first place, and for a week no one could call me. I don't even know if they fixed it or if it resolved itself. (On the other hand, it WAS resolved!) Then there are the occasional termination issues. There have been a few numbers I've tried to call that just won't go through. When that happens, I open a ticket, they solve the routing problem, and things work again. The first time, I couldn't call my wife's cell phone. After toying around with it myself, I discovered that the call would go through on premium routing, just not on value routing. I then switched all of my routes set to premium, which is fine with me. (I'd even pay a higher premium per minute charge if they'd get everything working smoothly!) It took 48 hours to get the problem fixed on the value line, although as it turned out I never went back to that setting. The second time, I couldn't reach Kauai Toyota and I need to make an appointment to get my car fixed and I couldn't. So, it was another ticket, and more waiting. This time I got an error calling on the premium route, and an echo test on the value route. It took 24 hours to get the route fixed that time. The third time things really went nuts. For a while I couldn't call any landline at all while they were troubleshooting, but in the end it all got fixed. Every time I am unable to call with voip.ms, I log into my Vitelity account and am able to place the call just fine. It's got so frustrating I even tried to install Asterisk on my computer to see if running my own PBX might help the situation. (I learned there are a lot of issues with Asterisk on systems with insufficient power, like my WRT54GS router, and setting up Asterisk is not an easy chore.) Now that some people have pointed out there are a couple of other service providers with 808 DIDs, I've purchased other accounts with Vitelity and CallCentric (even though they don't have 808 DIDs). The outbound service with both providers is smoother with both (phones ring right away, no strange silence, no problems with echo tests), and if I could combine their outbound service with voip.ms I would. In the end, voip.ms gets the job done. UPDATE: 10/5/2010 VOIP.MS made a routing change to the account, however now I am unable to call either Toyota or my wife's work, although I can still call her cell phone. (Things are worse.) UPDATE: 10/22/2010 It took a LONG time, but VOIP.ms solved the routing problems by setting up an extra route for these phone calls. Service may take a while, but they DO respond, and they keep at it until the problem is fixed, so that earns them an A in my book. member for 20 years, 9 visits, last login: 13.4 years ago updated 13.4 years ago
As others have said, you need to have some baseline knowledge before setting things up with Voip.ms, but their support is quite responsive, I'm sure an average user could eventually figure it all out. It's just not as straight-forward as other providers. I almost look at that as a good thing, because they have a decent amount of things you can setup. Call quality has been great and the cost has just been dirt cheap. A dollar or two for the DID each month and my average usage has been around $2-6/mo. Good choices for servers too. Luckily there's one just a few hundred miles away and I can get a consistent 12-18ms ping. member for 14.4 years, 2541 visits, last login: 4.5 years ago lodged 13.5 years ago
Got my account with voip.ms a few months back but I did not use it for anything (basically I only wanted to check the capabilities of their portal). Then in June the VoIP provider I was using for my main home number (Toronto area code) raised the price by about 500% so I decided it was time to move so I ported the DID to pay-as-you-go on my voip.ms account. The porting process took about 2 days to verify and submit to the carrier, then the actual port happened in just a couple hours. Then I found that the old company was using the same CLEC as voip.ms. I've been using the service ever since for my inbound calls (outbound is going through FreePhoneLine) and the quality has always been great. The only glitch I had was when they moved all the DIDs from the Toronto1 server to the Toronto2 and my asterisk was still caching the IP of the Toronto1. I know there have been other people complaining about the Toronto server but I've never had any issues with it. member for 18.2 years, 5437 visits, last login: 2 days ago lodged 13.5 years ago
I was looking for a backup/alternative VOIP provider. My family often calls western Europe. We also have a weekend home, both residences with broadband. I had been on Future-nine for a while. Between our cell phones and the fact that most of our landline calls are international, a pay as you go plan made the most sense for us. I select premium routes for all call and use a Linksys ATA at both places. The biggest issue for me had been that I often got complaints that the volume for people I spoke with was quite soft, and the I often (20% of the time, or so) had long delays after dialing before getting a connection, sometimes not getting one at all. I also missed a dial in number, but didn't quite feel it was worth $5/month for our particular situation. voip.ms solved all of these problems for me. It also had some features that are great for us, allowing us to create sub-accounts that can call from one house to the other for no cost. I got a phone number for only 99 cents a month. And the connection problems are gone. I have had literally zero problems since I followed the guide to programming my ATAs. I continue to have future-nine as a backup, but have not used it in a few months. I got perfectly acceptable service, but for me, voip.ms is more reliable and meets my needs better. I wonder if its because of the ability to register with a VoIP server closer to you geographically. member for 19.8 years, 186 visits, last login: 252 days ago lodged 13.5 years ago
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