Reviews:
 ·Whistlephone
·ukddi.com
·voip.ms
·localphone.com
·Callcentric
·RebTel
·FreePhoneLine
·Magictalkbox
| My preference is for an independent voip provider A relative has the cogeco phone service, along with the internet, and has no problems with it, and it has always sounded good when we talked over the phone.
The thing I am skeptical about is the price: $56/month can buy you a lot of minutes if you use a dedicated voip service.
Voip.ms, which is my main voip service, is a pay-as-you-go service. They charge me as follows:
$1/month for an incoming phone number
1.25 cents/minute to make outgoing calls to North America.
1.00 cents/minute on incoming calls.
If I paid them $56/month, I would have the phone plus $55 worth of minutes.
If the minutes were spread evenly between incoming and outgoing, I would have:
2200 minutes (37 hours) of outgoing calls (2750 minutes / 1.25).
plus
2750 minutes (46 hours) of incoming calls (2750 minutes / 1.00).
Plus all the bells and whistles you mentioned - call forwarding, etc. Plus a lot more things like Callback, sub-accounts, etc.
The sound quality of the calls, incoming and outgoing, is as good as cogeco's. The reliability is as good as cogeco's.
For me, a dedicated voip provider makes the most sense. You will need to invest in an 'ATA', analogue telephone adapter, for $60 or so. You can get them by mail from newegg.ca or swiftgamers.com, to name two Canadian mail-order outfits. Do a search on 'voip' and you should see some.
There are a number of voip providers who charge a flat monthly fee, often around $25, for 'unlimited', which usually means no more than 3000 minutes / month for total incoming + outgoing. |
