VOIP etc > Voice Over IP - VOIP > VOIP Tech Chat > Vonage vs Lingo

Vonage vs Lingo

I have Vonage for almost 2 years and tried Lingo a couple of month back for almost 1 month.
A lot of the issues I had with Lingo where cosmetic (caller id issues) - but the main one was no G.711 . I didn't like the call quality on Lingo - it sounded like my pittyfull landline I had before vs. Vonage with G.711 sounding almost as good as ISDN in Europe.... So despite the savings (I call Germany a lot) voice quality won the comparison for me and I stayed with Vonage...
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I am addicted to speed --- OOL speed that is ---
~Help find a cure for cancer~Proud Member Team Discovery

reply to La Luna
Lingo's rates to the UK are the best by far. But if you need a backup plan, Packet8 now charges 1.8 cents per minute to the UK.

Of course, if you call just one number there are better options, such as FWD.
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Welcome to the 21st century. You'll do fine here. Just don't expect anything to work quite the way it is supposed to...

reply to La Luna
I can't speak for anything other than Lingo as I have tried nothing else and only had it for 3 weeks or so.

However it installed for me right out the box with the ATA behind my router. No ports opened for it to work and I even got the firmware update automatically.

Quality seems to be fine and people in UK can't tell I am on VoIP. My brother did notice slight difference when I told him but no-one else has noticed and with my mother the conversation is one way only and I can hear her just fine - smile.

Reliability has been good but I've only 3 weeks experience. There have been a couple of outages in the past couple of days as mentioned here in the forum but not for excessive periods.

The tech support and and customer service are polite but usually manage to answer without actually answering the question if you use e-mail. Phone calls are handled better but you will be on hold for a while. Basically if it works and you don't have to call them things seem to be great in my limited experience.

I got Lingo exactly for this reason of calling UK. The unlimited plan/price is great as I was spending $30 to $50 every month on MCI International plus $30 for POTS and $25 for cell. Lingo should cut that a lot but I am thinking of keeping basic POTS service for a while to be sure about reliability.

Haven't tried porting my original POTS number yet but that's the next adventure!

Simon

reply to La Luna
I like Vonage. Its got one of the largest consumer bases for a VoIP company, and the quality is very good. I got my number ported successfully in 1.5 months, but I was able to use my POTS telephone during that time so I didnt lose calls to my number.

reply to La Luna
I am currently using Vonage and Lingo. I added Lingo a week ago because of the unlimited calling to the UK, and plan to drop the one I like less.

At the end of the day, blohner is right. Call quality and service reliability have been better with Vonage. However, I am probably going to go with Lingo because of the savings and hope that the quality gets better with time.

If you have an ear for quality, you're probably better off with Vonage. If cost is your main concern, Lingo will do the trick.

reply to La Luna
I have both vonage and lingo. I find lingo calls have better fidelity than vonage's, this in spite of lingo using a compressed codec, the g.729. I also find that calls from a lingo to vonage phone and vice versa tend to break up a bit. This I should expect because of the different codecs used by the 2 voip carriers. This is something that more and more people may well notice as voip usage expands.

-er

reply to La Luna
Is it possible to port your Vonage assigned # to Lingo? I have heard you can do Vonage to Packet8 ports...just curious.

reply to ejrobinson

said by ejrobinson:

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I also find that calls from a lingo to vonage phone and vice versa tend to break up a bit. This I should expect because of the different codecs used by the 2 voip carriers. This is something that more and more people may well notice as voip usage expands.

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reply to ejrobinson
I wish I could get Vonage out here in the 928 area -- cow country -- Prescott, Arizona. But I'll have to settle for getting three month's free service and unlimited calls to US, Canada and Western Europe with Lingo. Oh, well. [Sarcastic smile.]

ejrobinson brought up a point that is worth embellishing. The choice between the high-quality (G.711) and low-quality (G.729) codecs may boil down to the speed of your broadband connection. If you try to run G.711 with a 128kbps uplink, you may end up having enough dropped and discarded packets that the connection sounds worse than with G.729 over the same connection. Something like this happened to a friend with a home Vonage account. His voice quality went up when he switched to the lower-quality codec (see the logic?).

You might try running some tests using »testyourvoip.com and toggling between "Preserve Speech Quality" and "Conserve Bandwidth". Look at the detailed results when you connect to Boston, San Jose, London, etc. Conside the uplink and downling stats independently. Run the tests while there is no other network traffic going on, and no other apps besides your browser running on your computer. Should tell you a lot about what's going on.

Anyway, my 2¢.
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Bert Sierra • Tempered MicroDesigns • Prescott, AZ

It is unfair and false to call the g.729 codec low quality. In fact, its quality is only slightly inferior to that of the g.711 codec. If it were low quality then neither packet8 nor lingo nor broadvox direct would be able to retain customers as they do. The g.729 has the advantage of performing satisfactorily when the upload speed is marginal, for one reason or another. The g.711 fails under such conditions.

-er

I guess I should have more accurately referred to the codecs as 'high quality' and 'low bandwidth', which is how most VoIP providers appear to refer to them....
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Bert Sierra • Tempered MicroDesigns • Prescott, AZ

reply to La Luna
I also had Vonage but now have Lingo. When I first signed up with Vonage the call quality was sub par. I would hear echos and outages were not uncommon. When I signed up with lingo it was very similar. I was very hesitant to switch but the promise of international numbers was too much to resist.
Over time both companies call quality have gotten better.