Cheapest VoIP Provider?
So who is the cheapest VoIP phone provider out there? Well assuming we are looking at residential VoIP plans and not calling card plans, softphones/PC phones or business VoIP solutions then Lingo wins that battle with their basic plan costing $7.95 per month. So what do you get from Lingo for that price? You’ll get the typical features for free, Voicemail, call waiting, call forwarding and Caller ID with name. You’ll also get some advanced features like 3-way calling, anonymous call rejection, do not disturb and all calls to other Lingo users are free. With this basic plan you also get the Emergency calling service (911). This isn’t a bad deal at all.
You also get more than just the features and the price, there are a few intangible benefits related to Lingo. Lingo is a subsidiary of Primus Telecommunications Group, joining the VoIP phone service market in 1999, so they have been around for a while and have a mature product, which should relate to fewer problems for the customer. Lingo have been reviewed by customers over fifty five times on our site. This gives 55 completely independent opinions about the same service, more than enough for you to judge the quality of their service.
What don’t you get? Well every minute costs 3 cents regardless of where you are calling to in the US or Canada. Still not a bad deal but then if you have a teenage daughter on the phone for 3 hours every night them maybe this is not the VoIP plan for you. The cheapest plan that has unlimited minutes to all of the US and Canada is Viatalk. At $15.95 per month you get unlimited calling in the US and Canada and at present they have a special deal of 1 Year free. Less than $10 a month for unlimited calls and a whole bunch of features thrown in, that’s an exceptional deal that won’t last long.
Cost should not be the only consideration when choosing a VoIP service, customer VoIP reviews give you an excellent insight into a company, friends and relatives recommendations are also useful and your own experience of a provider should all be weighed. Many customer choose to go with their broadband carrier for example Verizon have DSL and they have their Voicewing or Comcast broadband have their Comcast Digital Voice service.
VoIP is an inexpensive, reliable alternative to your traditional phone. Have a read at our How To Select a VoIP Provider article for tips on how to select the best VoIP provider that suits you and your families calling habits.
Technorati Tags: Lingo, Viatalk, Broadband Phone, VoIP, Cheap Phone, Digital Voice, Verizon, Voicewing
April 21st, 2007 at 11:34 am
Well, I don’t know about ViaTalk since I’ve never heard of them, but I HAD Vonage and was very dissapointed. Vonage has lots of issues wrong with its service, some of which are serious flaws for both conference calling and 3-way calling. In my experience, when you connect the 3rd person into the 3-way, it usually take 20-30 seconds of asking if the person can hear me before they finally respond audibly. This is an unacceptable issue with Vonage that they cannot (or will not) fix, even after many hours of waiting on hold or talking to their outsourced call centers in India whose reps try futilely to translate highly detailed instructions in pure broken-English.
Today, I’m with JOiPhone, a fairly new company owned and operated by Hawk Communications (the makers of my wireless router, branded ‘Hawking Technologies’) see: http://www.joiphone.com/ and its been flawless (without the above issues I was plagued with using Vonage).
Besides, the calling plans and features rock the competition with a price better than anyone I can find anywhere. $14.95 per mo. for 2 unlimited lines (3-way enabled!!) keep your landline number, 2 anywhere-area code lines, all Cisco VoIP equipment & adaptors sent 2-day FedEx for Free, no contracts, pay month-to-month or anuual plan+1 Year Free, 30-day 1-month no quibble money-back guarentee, cancel anytime with no cancellation fee or setup fee. Anyway, you need to see who’s out there besides Vonage. While Vonage’s market penetration is huge, its based on a 100+million annual advertising budget that leaves little spare change for improvement on its equipment infrastructure and little room for satisfying its existing customer base over the long run because they’re so busy signing up new people, then casting them aside for the remaining cash-cow-customers they’re still targeting.
Word is, Vonage is on the fast-track to Chapter 11 bankruptcy with their latest legal entanglements surrounding all the recent multi-million dollar law suits filed against them by Sprint and Verizon for patent infringement of their Voice-Over-IP technology, and for exploiting that technology for monetary gain like so many fly-by-night con artist outfits saturating the Internet these days. (See Vnunet newswire: http://tinyurl.com/yvalev or check out this week’s Business week article: http://tinyurl.com/2yxpyf ) Don’t get me wrong, I wish Vonage all the luck (that’s all they have), but I’m afraid their days of VoIP glory are numbered along with their existing customer base, who will be shafted when Vonage is shut down. I’ll admit, JOiPhone may be a newer kid on the block having just started about 2 ½ years ago, it looks like they’ll be here for a long, long time to come; http://www.joiphone.com/ Call their sales/tech support, you’ll be amazed how fast, friendly and knowledgeable they really are. That’s my 2 cents, anyway.