voip.ms discussion

[ronepowell]

Thanks to some of the other threads on this forum, I decided to try and set up my own voip, and signed up with voip.ms. I managed to set up a PAP2T in about 20 minutes, and, amazingly, I was calling across the country immediately. So far, voice quality is excellent. We'll see how it goes over a period of time and I will give an update in six months or so. Assuming all goes well, it begs the question --'Why doesn't everyone do it this way"?

[ronepowell]

After one week, everything is going great. I should point out that the voip.ms configuration examples were very minimal, and I did use the examples from callwithus, and callcentric to set up the PAP2. The callcentric instructions for starting the configuration were particularly helpful.

[325xi]

I use them for a while, and it's all good. They are very reliable, especially compared to those $9.95/mo services we all know about.

They recently added very powerful routing features, so you can automatically manage your calls based on date, time, and / or caller id. Unlimited DIDs are (IMHO) overpriced, but PAYG DIDs priced very well.

[GusX]

Anymore reviews about these guys? I'm trying to decide between them and Vonage ... any advice is appreciated.

[PhotoJim]

I like them a lot. You'll get a lot more support from Vonage (it's more consumer-oriented) but this stuff is not that difficult. When I have had technical issues I've gotten reasonably fast answers.

My only problem with them is that they have a paucity of Canadian rate centres available. For example, you can't get a number anywhere in Saskatchewan.

If the rate centres they have are fine with you, use them and enjoy them.

I do find the premium rate termination is of significantly higher quality than the budget rate termination. The rate is still low.

The new callback service is really great. I have Canada-wide My5 on my Rogers account and got a Calgary DID to use with it. If I call my Calgary number, voip.ms will call me back and give me a dialtone. For a total of 2.5 cents a minute US I can call anywhere in North America and most of western Europe.

les.net is also worth considering. Slightly better support, slightly lower quality termination, but still good. les.net has Regina and Saskatoon numbers, which makes it more useful for me.

[PhotoJim]

I should also point out that both are prepaid services so you can use both. Stick twenty bucks in each one and use them based on your need. I have a Linksys PAP2 and each line is configured for one of the two services.

[sumeetkapoor]

Hey Bud! Before you make that call let me tell you, Vonage has the worst customer service. They bunch of morons, who don't know what they are talking about. Their so called refer-a-friend deal which offers two months free, when your friend stays with Vonage for three months. It took them four months to credit it to my account, total of seven freakin months and minimum half hour on the phone everytime i called. There will be hidden costs, if you wish to cancel their services. Last but not least, make sure you have unlimited Internet usage.

[yoder]

Any of you folks using Tomato routers - can you give me a sense of what your "baseline" activity is on your network? (i checked this by looking at 'last 24 hours activity')

I'm a bit surprised to see that "at rest" - my baseline activity is about 7kb /second upload, and about 10kb/download / second download. Thats about 0.8gigs / day!

This is adding up over time. I'm not sure where/why it is coming from - possibly from my phone registering to voip.ms?

Anyone have anything similar?

[Mango]

I am in the process of porting away from a spammer on this site to VoIP.ms. Here are my first impressions so far:

Setup was super fast. Within a minute of payment, I was talking on my phone. They had to set up my DID manually but did it in less than an hour even though they advertised up to four.

VoIP.ms is a geek's dream. There are a seemingly endless array of configuration options that I can play with to my heart's content. I think about the only step up from this would be actually having my own Asterisk box. It's all very well explained (easier to learn than Asterisk!) so that non-geeks should enjoy it too.

Two things in particular wowed me about VoIP.ms: the first is the diagnostics available on their website. You can tell whether or not your extensions are registered, what IP they come from, and when the next registration is expected. My last provider didn't have anything close to that. If you had a problem, you just had to guess at it

The second thing that wowed me is that VoIP.ms has SEVEN severs around the United States, Canada, and even the UK. This means that if I had a problem with a server, I could simply switch to another server in a minute or less. Or, I could set up extensions on multiple servers and have one failover to the other. I can also pick any server I want based on the one that has the best latency to my location.

There are three rate options for termination (outgoing calls):
- Special Rates, about $0.0045/minute to Canada. I found the call quality here too poor to be of use.
- Value Rates, $0.0049 to $0.0114/minute to Canada; $0.0105/minute to the US. Call quality was not as good as Premium Rates, but very usable. (And yes - that's less than half a cent per minute!) I had to set DTMF mode to Info for DTMF (buttons on a touch-tone phone) to work here.
- Premium Rates, $.0125/minute to Canada and the US. Call quality with these rates was excellent.

There are two rate options for DIDs (incoming calls):
- $0.0149/minute and $1.99/month. You can receive a theoretically unlimited number of calls.
- $8.95/month, no per-minute billing. You can receive a maximum of two calls at one time.

VoIP.ms has a 4.5/5 star rating on Voxalot (les.net has 4/5) and if things continue to go as well as they are I plan on rating VoIP.ms highly as well.

[PhotoJim]

I agree with your review. voip.ms is a terrific provider. They don't have numbers in all provinces yet, unfortunately, but the quality of the service they have is really good.

I found the value rate quality was a little marginal but the premium rate quality is really good and the rates are still reasonable enough.

[Mango]

Today's update: I discovered I was unable to call lots of Canadian toll-free numbers. So, I switched to the Toronto server (I was on the LA server before) which solved the problem. However, call quality was not as good as the LA server. I discovered with a ping test that I was getting about 1% packet loss to Toronto which was coming from the last hop before the SIP server. So, I tested the Montreal server and found 0% loss. I switched to it and calls have been great ever since.

We had a really curious issue happen the other day. I used a landline to call my wife on the VoIP phone, a Linksys SPA-921. She answered and...it kept ringing. The call eventually went to voicemail. I have not been able to reproduce this. Has anyone else seen this?

One other thing: VoIP.ms tells me that they are working on getting a server up in Vancouver! Yay

[lawman]

I'm thinking about switching to voip.ms to try it out. I'm currently using vbuzzer, and the quality has been great so far. I'm ony using SIP for long-distance calling as a pay-as-u-go. I'm wondering if anyone knows how good the voip.ms VALUE option compares with vbuzzer? Anyone know?

Thanks.

[Mango]

Had another interesting issue today. My wife (why does it always happen with her??) tried to leave a message on the VoIP phone and it cut her off after about three seconds. I have not been able to reproduce this.

Never used VBuzzer; sorry.

[99semaj]

Originally Posted by Mango

Today's update: I discovered I was unable to call lots of Canadian toll-free numbers. So, I switched to the Toronto server (I was on the LA server before) which solved the problem. However, call quality was not as good as the LA server. I discovered with a ping test that I was getting about 1% packet loss to Toronto which was coming from the last hop before the SIP server. So, I tested the Montreal server and found 0% loss. I switched to it and calls have been great ever since.

I live near Toronto, and last night I decided to ping and traceroute both Montreal and Toronto servers. Surprise! The Montreal server had two less hops (12 vs 14) and the ping time was HALF versus Toronto. I switched everything over with the exception of the custom VM settings which tech support needs to do.

[Mango]

Originally Posted by holymoly

If you are porting to voip.ms it takes longer for Canadian customers. Mine took eight weeks back in August.

My port hit eight weeks yesterday and I don't even have a FOC yet. I've also been waiting on a DID assignment that hit six weeks on Wednesday. My first DID was assigned in a few hours, and I suspect the length of time on this one is a casualty of the issues VoIP.ms was having with their ticket system. Anyway, they're telling me I should be able to use it by Tuesday of next week which will be one day short of seven weeks.

Originally Posted by 99semaj

Surprise! The Montreal server had two less hops (12 vs 14) and the ping time was HALF versus Toronto

Heh. Curious the way internet routing sometimes works. One thing I like about VoIP.ms is the fact that we have choice in the server we connect to. The packet loss issue I was having wasn't VoIP.ms' fault as it wasn't their server causing the packet loss, and I didn't have packet loss with another ISP with different routing. Not their fault, not my fault, and nothing either of us can do about it except wait. In this case it took about a week and a half for the problem to be sorted, but I didn't care because I just used a different server.

m.