Any suggestions on a reliable voip service?

I had a chat with the Vonage tech support person last night. He
admitted that the signal-to-noise ratio is different with VoIP than with
the PSTN, which can result in noticable hiss during what he called
"silent periods" (ie. no one talking).

 

www.mypeople.com

Excellent fidelity due to a high bit rate codec.

 

I've had good experiences with Teliax, VoipJet and Voxee. Also the services
offered by the Finarea/Betamax companies have improved their quality, after
they started to outsource the gateways to TVIconnect; the latency is
especially low for customers in Europe (the gateways appear to be in the
Netherlands). And 300 free minutes over 7 days to many "mainstream"
destinations are a nice touch, although they have annoyed many users with
their frequent changes to the list, and one has to buy 10 euro of credits
every at least 120 days to keep the accounts alive. See
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Finarea+SA , with a free destinations
table that I'm trying to keep reasonably up to date.

Enzo

 

Yes, Teliax is also good. I have had some weird billing issues with
them but they always fix them within 1-2 days. So all in all, not bad.

I like Sipdiscount a lot. I route all of my US calling through it and
also call 2 destinations in Europe. No problems so far.

 

You never did say what your voip was encoded with. It is important.
Do they use some compressing codec? VOIP when set up to maximize
quality should be encoded with ulaw (aka G711u) same as POTS.
If you fix that you should be see a large improvement.

Personally, I can't see ever using a voip provider that doesn't let
you see the full range of setting and change them if they aren't right
for you.

If you still are interested in experimenting, teliax allows you to
start an account with $10 and that is good for 2,000 minutes of
outbound-only traffic with no expiration or monthly. You bring your
own phone or ATA. They'll let you set the phone up with whatever
codec you like. It is also a low risk way to experiment with voip.

-wolfgang

 

SIP providers usually only let you configure user-level features
(voicemail etc.), not critical hardware settings. Can you imagine
trying to troubleshoot the problems that can result from users changing
settings whose consequences they don't really understand?

Vonage never suggested changing the default encoding algorithm as a way
to eliminate the background hiss from quiet periods.

 

Vonage's business model may very well require that they compress the
hell out of the audio stream. The bandwidth is cheaper for them that
way (although it costs a bit more in CPU time to expand it again to
ulaw when they gateway it into the PSTN).

-wolfgang

 

In message <> "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht"

So it all depends on what's cheaper today, bandwidth or CPU power.

 

If you replace Sipdiscount with VoipStunt or, better (for the time being),
VoipDiscount, you will enjoy the same quality (the servers are the same) but
also gain a longer list of sort-of-free destinations: at the moment, 35 and
48 respectively vs Sipdiscount's 17. It is true that the support for SIP is
unofficial (they tend to push their free softphone which uses a proprietary
protocol) but it works fine. On the other hand, no more IAX2 since they
passed to TVIconnect's gateways, which are not based on Asterisk.

By the way, has anybody tried Globotech
(http://www.gtcomm.net/en/voipwholesale.php )? They do pay-as-you-go and
their rates appear quite attractive.

On the "don't walk, run" front, I suffered HORRENDOUS service from Sixtel
(a.k.a. iax.cc): their termination to non-US destinations never managed to
work properly, and my trouble tickets went unanswered (not to mention my
requests for a refund). Well, at least I was not their only victim: see
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=iax.cc ... Now it seems they
have merged with Exgn giving birth to a (misspelled ;-) ) "Vitelity". I hope
the DNA of the newborn will mostly come from the other parent...


Enzo

 

I was in search of a calling service that gives me the facility of making international calls with good voice quality and reasonable calling rates. I read the reviews of Axvoice on the Internet and decided to acquire their connection.

 

I know so much has changed regarding VoIP service in the past few years and I know a few companies out there are doing it right. One of these is www.1-voip.com or 1-VoIP. Excellent customer service and call quality. PERFECT fit if you want to save some money if you need a home phone.

 

Hi,
Maybe it's been mentioned here before, but I also recommend you the Ozeki VOIP-SIP-SDK
From here you can download a lot of sample programs:
http://www.voip-sip-sdk.com/p_190-h...e-sip-stack-without-using-an-ip-pbx-voip.html

 

I'm satisfied with their services. Check it, may be it helps you: http://www.minttec.com/voip/