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Review by dev_null See Profile

  • Location: New England
  • Cost Contract price not specified.
Free; connectability to Google Voice
Inconsistent quality
Nice way to dip your toe into VOIP without cost (IF you have a G5 account already!)
Web-site:
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Call Quality:
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Have had a Gizmo account for years but only when I started dabbling in VOIP about 2 years ago did I start to actually use it.

First ATA was a HT286, but couldn't get consistent connection to G5, sometimes would register but have 1-way sound only, other times connection was fine, sometimes would not register. Tried both behind and in front of firewall, but no real difference.

Then got an unlocked 2-line router/ATA. Registration issues resolved, but inconsistent call quality continued. Second line allowed me to experiment while keeping the GV-G5 integration.

After much experimenting, I've decided that G5 quality is just lousy (you get what you pay for), so I'm basically using the G5 for outgoing toll-free calls where quality doesn't matter, and SIP forwarding so I can keep the GV-G5 link alive. At least the SIP forwarding is still active on the G5 website.

I should note that the SIP-forward G5 call comes through as g711 whereas an actual G5 incoming call on the ATA comes in as g729, so by SIP-forwarding to another provider, the same call is much clearer. But part of that may be the hardware, which just might not be up to the g729 processing task.

I've toyed with the idea of buying another G5 account from Ebay to link to another GV account but haven't bothered since I figure at some point Google will change one or both of these services, and I don't want to be too bound to that model.

member for 21.6 years, 3500 visits, last login: 6 days ago
updated 13.4 years ago


Review by kieranmullen See Profile

  • Location: Portland, Washington, OR, USA
  • Cost: $2 per month (12 month contract)
Unlimtied incomming service for $35 is great. No downtime.
Customer service via email. Sometimes hard to held ahold of.
If you need hand holding this may not be for you.
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
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Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

For pay as you go with your own dedicated number you can't get much cheaper than this. The price of some numbers may vary but most of them are $35 per year or $12 for 3 months. Outgoing calls are only .19 per minute which is the top end what some providers will charge you to terminate calls. Most charge .01 but that is not much. They support mutliple softphone or hardware ATA registrations on the same account. Video chat, call recording, free voicemail, business accounts, Asterisk. SMS Etc Many features similar to skype except skype does not allow for hardware registration.

Worldwide Shared Call In Numbers

They are registered with the sipbroker.com network. To find your sip number form the Gizmo softphone dial ** Then go to »sipbroker.com/sipbroker/ ··· nNumbers pick a number, call it and then enterdial *747 followed by your full gizmo number 1-747-XXX-XXXX and you're connected.

More free outbound calling

Toll free numbers are of course free, it helps to use the softphone client when calling customer service so you can record your experience. They have a backdoor calling program in which many destinations are actually free to call BUT it plays a short message at the beginning of each call. So it is not the best thing to use for business calls.

member for 18.3 years, 917 visits, last login: 3.3 years ago
updated 15 years ago