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I have an Asterisk 1.6 PBX running at my home. I had been using a Vonage soft-phone account for over three years, but wanted to switch to a provider that supports BYOD on my primary number. I tried these four providers: AxVoice, CallCentric, Future-Nine, and Voip.ms. I thought that all four had similar call quality. The VoIP.ms website is laid out well and it is very easy to use. When ordering a DID number, I was able to see a list of actual numbers to choose from before placing the order. When you log on to the website, the first screen is a list of news items and an issue tracker. I think it would be better if information about my account or recent calls were on the first screen. CallCentric has a fantastic dashboard that provides a lot of useful information. A phone number in my city was in stock, so it only took a few minutes between when I signed up and when my number was active. VoIP.ms does support E911 in my area. They also provide an 811 number to test the 911 configuration. They support CNAM inbound and outbound. I can set the outbound CNAM from my Asterisk system. VoIP.ms was the only provider that I tested that provides this feature. DID numbers are billed in advance on the anniversary of when the number was established, instead of on the first of the month. At the end of my evaluation, I was deciding between CallCentric and VoIP.ms. CallCentric has a better website and fax support, but requires Asterisk settings that I didn’t like. VoIP.ms supports outbound CNAM. I decided to choose VoIP.ms primarily because I wanted outbound CNAM support. Update: I ported two numbers from Vonage to VoIP.ms. The website says it should take between 2 and 4 weeks. The first port took 15 days and the second took 22 days. Not bad! Update: I have been using Voip.ms for over a year and I am very happy with the service. I have contacted tech support a couple of times and gotten reasonable responses. They have also created an OK dashboard. Update: I have been using Voip.ms for two and a half years now and am still very happy with the service. I am also using Asterisk Version 10. member for 19.8 years, 40 visits, last login: 3.2 years ago updated 12.2 years ago
I liked it so much i personally help 4 of my friends to switch from att to voip.ms. Thats should tell you something. member for 14.1 years, 25 visits, last login: 11.1 years ago lodged 12.2 years ago
Voip.ms is an amazing company. Their service is essentially a very low-cost excellent voip service. You can tell that their admin webpage they give you to administer your account is a wrapper for their Asterisk servers. The service has almost no minimum monthly cost - it is entirely pay-as-you-go. The per-minute rates are very fair. My house spends ~40 hours on the phone per month and we pay $18. If you don't use the service, you don't pay for it. The only recurring monthly costs are for the DIDs and for e911 - both are only a couple of bucks. The completely pay-as-you-go nature of the service means there's no liability for unexpected enormous international phone bills, you just have a pre-paid balance that you could potentially chew through. The downside to this is is that there is no "automatic top up" feature. You have to manually add funds yourself on a regular basis. This is not a "set it and forget it" service. The whole service is entirely self-administered. VoIP.ms gives you all the options that normally a customer service rep would only get access to. There's no marketing B.S., no "extra fees" for certain value added services. You pay pretty much exactly what they pay, plus a small margin so that the company can stay in business. The web panel lets you do everything - account registration, ordering and transferring of DIDs, setting up e911, adding funds, connecting accounts, and setting up all the options for the account. You can have a telephone number and be placing calls in under 5 minutes - without ever having to talk to anybody on the phone. VoIP.ms makes signing up for voip services as easy and as self-service as signing up with an email provider. On the other hand this makes the service not so great for end consumers who don't understand VoIP and expect everything to just "work" like a Bell phone line. VoIP is NOT equivalent to POTS, and your average joe doesn't necessarily understand that. VoIP.ms demands a certain level of administrative work and technical. My customers would get confused if they had to set it up themselves. This service is perfect for enthusiasts and techy geeks like myself who want to get their feet wet and experience and play with all of the features that VoIP has to offer. It's also good for IT administrators who want to offer a "managed" VoIP service to their customers and want direct, instantaneous control over the service. member for 13.5 years, 43 visits, last login: 7.6 years ago updated 12.2 years ago
It's been over a year since I made the switch to voip.ms. I figured it's time to clean up my review. -Ported numbers from AT&T, it took 18 days (including weekends) -Very easy to do, just sign a copy of the bill and pay $25 (wish it were lower, but spread out over my lifetime at voip.ms, it's not that bad) -AT&T didn't fight, they silently and happily gave up the number and mailed me a check for a handful of pennies. -AT&T measured rate was very expensive (~$20/mo after taxes) and doesn't include callerid, long distance, etc -$20 goes a long way at voip.ms -It's surreal seeing a 20yr+ old number have so much power -Callerid and callerid filtering is VERY useful -I typically forward known TELEMARKETER callers to the busy tone, I don't get many UNKNOWN callerids calling me -Having multiple channels is GREAT (many incoming calls, callers NEVER get busy tone... this is the part that's most surreal..unheard of on residential lines) -PBX-like functions are very useful -I had previously had Asterisk going to act as a calling card -Competitive prices and reliable service allow me to make voip.ms my one-stop choice for most voip -I hope they keep this up! member for 13.5 years, 924 visits, last login: 11 years ago updated 12.3 years ago
This is a summary of my experience comparing voip.ms with Call Centric gathered over the past 3 months. I wish that I had this information before I started and I am sure that others will appreciate it. My setup ======= I have two home telephone lines. I use voice on both lines and a fax on one of them. I tested both SIP providers using a Cisco SPA2102 Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA). I also tested a Grandstream HT502 for a while, but found that ATA quite lacking in comparison, so I stuck with the SPA2102. My ATA is located behind my Linksys WRT54GS router. I didn't want to put the SPA2102 in front of my router because I didn't want the bottleneck of SPA2102 for all internet traffic. I have a 10 MB/s link to the internet over fiber, so bandwidth isn't an issue. Here are the significant features that differentiate the two: ============================================= CNAM/LIDB lookup ----------------------- Voip.ms provided much more accurate inbound Caller ID information. Call Centric provided the worst information of any SIP provider that I have had experience with (except those that provide none of course). Call Centric returns the Caller ID number in 11 digit format instead of the 10 digit that I have seen with other SIP providers. I verified this by watching the SIP packets via Wireshark to ensure that they were sent with the 11 digit format. Call Centric verified that they send 11 digits and there is no way to change this. 11 digits on the Caller ID phone number caused display problems for my phone handsets. I asked both Call Centric and voip.ms to tell me who they use for CNAM lookup (freecnam.org, asteriskcnam.com, Accudata, other), and both companies declined to tell me. Call Centric states " We cannot provide you the name of our CNAM provider due to contractual reasons and company policy." Voip.ms replied with a vague "We use different carriers and the way our CNAM is sent is up the current carrier that the call is been sent." Voip.ms currently charges you $0.008 per inbound call for CNAM lookup. Call Centric does not charge extra. Here are some examples. Note that I have changed the names and numbers for privacy reasons, but the data examples are real. ** voip.ms returns: ELIZABETH BENTLY 801-602- xxxx BENTLY FAMILY 801-229- xxxx BENTCO 801-623- xxxx BRAD BENTLY 801-822- xxxx ** Call Centric returns: UT Wireless Cal 1801602xxxx Bently Brad 1801339xxxx Bently Brad 180162xxxx UT Wireless Cal 180182xxxx Accurate CNAM is critical for our family. It is my wife's most requested feature. If CNAM functionality is not important to you, then I recommend using Google Voice with an OBI110. Configure one channel to use a 911 provider and the other to use Google Voice. Port your number through a cellular SIM card. You will save a lot of money since Google Voice is (currently) free. Call Transfer --------------- Call Transfer lets a customer use their touchtone phone to send a call to any other phone, inside or outside their business, including a wireless phones. Once the call is sent, the customer can hang up the call and the other two parties remain connected. Attendant Call Transfer lets the customer announce the call before hanging up. Blind Call Transfer allows the customer to send the call to another phone number and hang up immediately. Here is the scenario. A call comes into my home. My wife answers the phone and finds out that it is for me. (Attendant Call Transfer) she can put the call on hold, call my cell phone, and when I answer she tells me who is calling. She can then conference us all three together and announce me to the caller. She can then hang up and I am talking with the caller. Voip.ms supports both attendant call transfer and blind call transfer using an ATA that supports this feature (I used the SPA2102 and SPA2002). Call Centric does not support this feature. When asked, Call Centric stated "We do not have any plans to offer blind and attended transfers as we do not provide hosted PBX solutions, we only provide VoIP service. If you would like to utilize these features you would want to use a PBX with our services." Ease of use out of the box -------------------------------- With both providers, I set up my ATA following their online configuration guides. Call Centric worked right away and was simple to set up. Voip.ms was more of a challenge. My ATA is located behind my router firewall and I experienced one way audio problems with voip.ms. While I still haven't completely resolved this issue, I currently believe that the problem is with my router - not with voip.ms. With that said, the Call Centric offering worked just fine with no one way audio problems. Call Centric appears to be a more robust and forgiving solution. Support ---------- My overall impression is that both voip.ms and Call Centric have roughly equivalent support. Both were responsive and polite. Both answered support questions at night and on the weekends. I didn't have significant problems with Call Centric, so I don't know how they would react to debugging technical issues. When I contacted Call Centric about support of features, the common theme was that we offer what we offer. Take it or leave it. Call Centric only offers email support - not chat or call in support. However, their email support replied back usually in less than 30 minutes and many times even faster. I spent a lot of time with Voip.ms trying to debug my one way audio issue. Their support techs seemed to understand setting up an ATA and their back end systems, but when I started talking about SIP handshaking and providing Wireshark traces of the problem, they didn't seem to understand the information. They kept falling back to "send me a screen shot of your ATA settings page". Also, many different techs responded to a single ticket thread, often asking for information that was provided earlier. I asked if I could just work with one tech that understood my ATA, but that request was ignored by a different tech asking once again to "send some screen shots from the Line configuration for review". Voip.ms offers email, chat, and phone support. I used all three. When I called the phone support, the Tech spoke with an accent that was hard for me to understand (I live in the USA). The chat support was pretty good, but most of the time I didn't have the time to dedicate to a chat conversation. Email support (through their ticket system) was the best for me. Fax --- I spent about 6 hours testing the fax capabilities of both SIP providers. I used a 15 page fax on normal quality with my analog fax machine (Brother MFC 9600) set as low as 9600 baud. My ATA supports T.38 fax. Stated support for fax differs for the two companies. Call Centric states that they support fax with the proviso "Technically we support fax using either the T.38 protocol or transparently with G.711. However, both largely depend on the reliability/stability of your internet connection." voip.ms states that they do not support fax. With that said, their support tech helpfully suggested "It may work for you if you try it with G.711u codec on the customer portal and on the device used along with Premium US48/Canada routing. However, we do not assure that it will work for you as desired." Call Centric wins this one hands down. They offer T.38 fax support which is much better, but not perfect. I was able to consistently send about 10 pages of a 15 page fax before being disconnected. They also offer the ability to receive faxes to their system and either forward them to you via email or download them from their web portal. Voip.ms does not have T.38 fax support. They suggest using high quality codecs (G711u) and some specific settings when using fax. I couldn't get more than about 4 pages to fax without being disconnected. I changed just about every setting imaginable in the SPA2102 ATA (and there are many) to improve performance, but never got better than about 4 pages. The default settings disconnect after about 2 pages. Voicemail ------------ Both SIP providers offer free voicemail. Both let you forward your messages to email. Call Centric uses a proprietary voicemail system that seemed to work pretty well, but recorded messages were often a bit quiet. They have an excellent on-line view of voicemail that lets you listen to messages and even download them from the web. Voip.ms uses comedian mail for their voicemail system. It worked fine, but there was no way to listen to messages on the web. Multiple phone lines on one account --------------------------------------------- Both providers allow for multiple DID lines, but only voip.ms allows more than one device (ATA, softphone, etc.) to register to your account. Call Centric requires you to set up a separate Call Centric account for each device. I actually prefer Call Centric's separate accounts because it keeps everything clean; however, the big drawback is that you have to maintain separate financial balances in each account. This means you also have separate billing statement for each phone number. Voip.ms allows virtually unlimited sub-accounts that each allow a unique device. You have one financial balance to pay for them with a consolidated statement which is very nice. The drawback is that the way you configure your devices for the main account and for sub accounts is very different. This was very confusing to me. Settings, such as DID, voicemail, and passwords are in completely different places for the main account and sub accounts. Choose your DID -------------------- When you sign up for an inbound phone number (DID), do you get to choose the number? Voip.ms gives you a long list of numbers from which to choose. Call Centric just assigns you one with no choice. Outbound Caller ID ----------------------- Both companies allow you to set the phone number that is sent when you call others. Voip.ms allows you to set it yourself online which is very quick and easy. Call Centric requires you to call a phone number and then log a trouble ticket and they set it up for you. Call Centric is worried about people spoofing others phone numbers. For example, with voip.ms I guess I could set my caller id to match that of a local radio station and then call people to tell them they won a brand new car and come and pick it up. Call Centric wants to have some human verification first. I prefer the freedom with voip.ms, but I understand why Call Centric verifies the number. It took Call Centric about 2 hours to set up my outbound caller ID. Hold Music -------------- Voip.ms allows you to play music when you put a caller on hold (flash). They have only one channel - smooth jazz, but it is nice and I implemented it. Call Centric does not offer music on hold. Dashboard ------------- Both SIP providers offer a nice, comprehensive, web based dashboard where you can configure your account, monitor performance, log tickets, and review your bills. My personal preference is that Call Centric's dashboard is a bit more user friendly, but both are very adequate. Other Comments --------------------- Both SIP providers offer 911 service. Both have high DSL customer ratings. Both have good voice quality. When I ran a cost analysis for the amount of calls that our family makes, I found voip.ms slightly cheaper than Call Centric. Both can port your existing number to their service for around $25. I was able to configure both SIP providers to support 7-digit (e.g. 555-1212), 10-digit (801-555-1212), and 11-digit dialing (1-801-555-1212) using the dial plan feature in the SPA2102. member for 12.3 years, 14 visits, last login: 9.5 years ago updated 12.3 years ago
I use it as my main phone. member for 14.1 years, 1818 visits, last login: 1.1 years ago updated 12.3 years ago
I barely use my phone at all, so my review of their normal phone service would be of little use. I would like to talk about their features; as of the reviews posted here that I have read, very little was said. When I was researching voip companies, I noticed that VOIP.MS already had, or was currently working on the features that I was looking for. And they were releasing about one feature per month. They have: DIDs, virtual-DIDs, Ring Groups, SIP URIs (incoming and out-going), multiple devices and DIDs per account, Call Forwarding, CallBacks, DISA access, CallerID filtering, auto-attendant menus, VoiceMail, etc.... But there are still other things that they are missing. I switched to VOIP.MS a year and a half ago. Unfortunately for me, most of those upcoming features that I was looking for, are still in development. And nothing new has been released since June! When I asked about adding 7-digit dialing, their response was "...7-digit dialing is dying out. All the companies are beginning to switch to 10-digit dialing." and on my second request "...you should just modify your ATA dialing plan to create your own 7-digit dialing; as it is very difficult for us to do in server coding." {I use a softphone, a cell phone app., and a very old ATA. The first two certainly do not support dialing plans, and the ATA is so old that I would doubt that it does either.} The lack of 7-digit dialing seems like that would be a notable negative to the average customer. The lack of FAXing support is also a little bit annoying. Another small annoyance is no "SMS notification of voice mail". When a voice mail arrives, you can have VOIP.MS send you an email to notify you (optionally with the voice mail as an attachment). But no option for sending a Text-Message (aka. SMS). {For me, this is a problem. As the SIP application in my Nokia N900 cellphone does not support the MWI (message waiting indicator). T-Mobile has a SMS-to-email gateway for their cell phone customers. But it doesn't like the notification email that comes from VOIP.MS server. So, I have no indication of any voice mails from my cell} VOIP.MS has "internal extension numbers" for multiple telephones with in your account. A very cool idea! Needed for businesses and useful for families (like when your kids go to college). But it is currently poorly supported. {Problem: CallerID displays as the SIP-URI. And no Caller-Name.} They have a future feature called "Modify CallerID to internal extension when calling another extension" that would fix this. {I believe it has been in "development" stage more than 18 months} They have another feature in-development, titled "Call Ring Group". I would assume that this means calling a Ring Group as an extension number (because, you can already call it via a DID line [after paying for an extra DID]). If it does in fact mean that; then this too would make extension numbers more usable. Then you could dial your child's (or employe's) extension, and ring their office/home, and cell phones in one shot. member for 18.3 years, 25 visits, last login: 9.4 years ago lodged 12.4 years ago
Origional post from I have been a VOIP.MS customer for over a year and an very satisfied. Call quality is excellent, reliability is very good and pricing ( PAYG) is more than fair. This service has lots of call features, more than I use, however the website can be a tad hard to understand to make use of these features. Tech support I used is by trouble tickets and e-mails. Replies are usually very timely and the technicians have patience. (;>). This service is a keeper! Update 10/17/2011: VOIP.MS just keeps working. Audio is clear, calls connect promptly and no outages to speak of. Calling rules are very powerful and useful allowing a mix and match of what phones ring and controlling forwarding / simultaneous ring of my home phones and cell phone. member for 20.2 years, 10670 visits, last login: 3 days ago updated 12.4 years ago
------------------------------------------------------------------------ I've been using voip.ms for just several days. That after evaluating the specs of many services on-line and trying test accounts on several VOIP providers (sipgate, callcentric, Google Voice). So far I'm loving it. Pros: * Excellent audio quality. On the other end of the line they say "best I've ever heard you sound over the phone". And that's in comparison to the Qwest (aka Centurylink) land line. * Distributed servers permit connection to the server with least latency. (–> Before setting up your accounts, ping their servers to find the fastest based on your own local routing!) * Very reasonable pricing * Portable numbers * Feature rich! Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and good voicemail with lots of options. * Techie oriented. If you're OK with getting into the technical issues you can do just about anything with this service that you could with a pbx. * Supports high-quality codecs. * Excellent, fast real-time chat tech support within their hours of operation. Cons: * Not the service for the technically challenged. If you're of the plug-and-play mentality, get Vonage or MagicJack. * Real-time tech support not 24/7 My configuration: * Cox cable internet service (Phoenix, AZ). * Cheap Airlink-101 AR670 router hardware running DD-WRT firmware. * OBi110 ATA (a piece of electronic wonderfulness worthy of its own review) that bridges two SIP services and an existing land-line to your existing local analog phone network – all for fifty bucks. * Uniden 2.4GHz wireless 4-handset phone setup Right now the only thing standing between this becoming our standard telephony service (aside cell) is the "wife factor". While I handle the technical aspects, she just needs to be able to pick up the phone next to her desk and have it work with no side issues. So far, so good. As I said, it's been just a few days. She's very impressed. And when I tell her what we'll save every month on phone bills, she's downright excited. Another few days and I'll flip the switch – port the old Qwest phone number to voip.ms. I'll update this report as the experience evolves. —W— ------------------------------------------------------------------------ member for 20.5 years, driveby review (so far) updated 12.4 years ago
Voip.ms is a solid service. I was having issues with keep alive but it turned out to be my ata device. Customer service is helpful and quick through the online client shell. The website has a bunch of options to personalize your account. Give BHell the shaft and save. member for 21.7 years, 1198 visits, last login: 274 days ago lodged 12.4 years ago |