Any suggestions on a reliable voip service?

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

, 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?

V> Patrick Coghlan writes:

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

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

)? 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

... 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