First Impressions of VoIP.ms ...are great!!
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.