Voip Deals Blog

PhonePower has added a new international calling plan which includes unlimited calls in the US & Canada plus 20 hours of international calls every month.

This positions PhonePower in direct competion with Vonage’s Vonage World℠ global plan. At the cost front, PhonePower offers three payments options compared to Vonage’s one monthly option. PhonePower’s monthly payment option costs $24.95/month (no contract) compared to Vonage’s $25.99/month(no contract).

There are two more options PhonePower offers that will bring down your per month cost.

The 12 month term option costs $22.95/month and the 24 month term options costs $19.95/month. These rates are very competitive and  the “20 hours of international call per month” should be enough even for regular callers who make calls to countries like India, China.

We believe this new PhonePower international plan will attract callers who make frequent India/China/Mexico calls and are looking for a Vonage alternative.

We recently had a post about Voip.com and in that post we had explained how Voip.com is a PhonePower company and how the voip service plans offered by the two are very similar pricewise as well as feature wise. So I was wondering about what if a current PhonePower customer wants to switch to Voip.com or vice versa, can he/she port his/her existing phone number.

With that question in mind, I just inquired with the Voip.com/PhonePower customer service posing the same question.

And the answer was “NO”. An existing PhonePower customer can’t port his/her phone number to Voip.com. So I am assuming the reverse will be true too. No number porting from voip.com to Phonepower.

I don’t like this idea but I can understand their will be some regulatory issues porting a number between the two since both are the same company.

Its been a while since Voip.com was acquired by Phonepower.com, a leading voip service provider with great service for residential voip customers.  Since the acquisition, though the service plans offered by Voip.com  has been alligned nicely with the Phonepower.com service plans. The Voip.com website has also undergone some face lifts and now greatly resemble that of Phonepower.

In all practical purposes, the voip services offered by Voip.com and PhonePower are the same, the technology behind the two are the same, customer service behind the two are the same.

Where is varies slightly is in the residential voip space, Voip.com offers a prepaid plan for a year of unlimited local and long distance calls in the US and Canada and free 60 minutes of international calls for $99, which brings the average cost down to $8.33/month. PhonePower’s pre-paid plan is for 2 years of unlimited calls in the US & Canada and free 60 mins of international call at $199.

Side by Side Comparison Voip.com & PhonePower

Features:

Both the providers offer the same array of features on all of their plans. Some of the major features are

• Free 2nd Cloned line
• Caller Id, Call Waiting, Call Hold
• 60 minutes Free International calls every month
• Block list
• Call Routing
• 3 Way Confernce
• *69 Call Return
• Soft Phone
• Free Fax Receive

and more. They list 45 calling features on their websites.

Read a full Voip.com review.

PhonePower, a leading voip service provider,  now offers its customer an iPhone app.

The app pretty much enables you to take your phone power phone service with you when you are away from home. There are some obvious benefits and then there are some features that you may already have just through the internet connection on your iPhone.

Let’s look at some of the features.

Account Management

With the app you can have full access to your account. You can perform tasks like manage block lists, view call logs, look up contacts in your phone power address book, set up call forwarding etc.

You can do all these tasks by accessing your online account on the iPhone browser too. But an app kind of makes the interface mobile friendly.

International calls

Make international calls using the phone power app. It uses the phone power click to call feature to make the international call. As you dial an international number from within the app, you will receive a call from your phone power number and as you answer the incoming call, it will connect you to the international number. So you will use your cell phone minutes for the duration of the call, and the international call will be billed to your phone power account at the pre defined rate. Point to note, the first 60 minutes of international call is free on the Phone Power unlimited voip plans.

Android and Blackberry Users wait

The app is now available for iPhone users only. PhonePower says, the app is coming soon for Android an Blackberry. So Android and Blackberry users, like myself, will have to wait a little longer.

For the road warriors Phonepower offers a voip usb adapter, they call it zippy travel adapter, which can be plug into the usb port of a laptop to make an receive calls. [note - the computer will need to be connected to the internet].

The adapter works the same way as the majicjack adapter. It has a RJ11 regular phone jack.  You will connect a phone to the phone jack on the zippy adapter and you can make or receive calls from the phone.

You can also attach a headset to the adapter. The headset comes free when you purchase the adapter, which costs $9.99.

Yesterday (May 19th) the phonepower.com website underwent a site makeover with a Web 2.0 look and a green color scheme. The design change, though nice, is not the change that excited us the most. With the design change, PhonePower announced two new features for their new and existing voip customers, that we think is worth writing home about.

The new features are

Voicemail Auto-Delete

If you are PhonePower voip phone service user, you may have noticed that your voicemails remains in your voicemail box for ever and when it gets full, callers can’t leave a voicemail. So you needed to log on to your account and delete some voice mails manually to make room.
(more on how to access your PhonePower Voicemails from any where)

Well, that will be a thing of the past soon.

From May 31st you can use the new auto-delete function for voicemails. Once you turn it on, there’s no need to manually delete old voicemails. Simply set the number of days before deletion, and you’re done.

Free Softphone

Now you can take your Phone Power phone service service with you on your laptop, no matter where you go? As of May 19th, you can download the PhonePower softphone free from www.phonepower.com/account. The softphone software works on Windows pcs only as of now. Using a headset you can make or receive calls with your Phone Power number. And most importantly there is no additional cost involved.

Here is a recent email we received from one of our readers and we liked it, a lot. So we decided to publish it here in our blog. Do you have a similar story, do you use a voip phone service. Send us your voip story from our contact us page or just post a comment here for a chance to win $50 gift card from Amazon.com. (THIS PROMOTION HAS ENDED)

No purchase necessary. Just tell us your story and the best story will be awarded a $50 gift card by email. So be sure to use a correct email address while submitting your entry.

Here is the email from Mark, a long time voip user and a long time reader of voipdealsreview.org. Thanks Mark for sharing your voip experience with us.

Hello Voipdealsreview.org,

I have been a visitor to your site and a subscriber to your mailing list for a few years now. When I first found this site, I was using a regular phone company. The articles and reviews on your site prompted me to switch to voip and save some money.

With my wife’s permission , I signed up with SunRocket with the then ongoing 1 year free offer. The pricing was really cheap ($199 for 2 years for unlimited calling) and I was apprehensive about it all.

But I was pleasantly surprised when I started using SunRocket. There was a slight drop in voice quality.  But the price that I was paying for unlimited long distance calls in the US, the slight drop in voice quality was fine with me.

After having used Sunrocket  for almost 18 months with hardly any issues (I never had to call their customer service in the 18 months), SunRocket went out of business suddenly.

I had to make a quick decision to switch to another phone company ASAP. By that time I was hooked to voip for its cost saving potential and didn’t want to go back to a regular phone company.

I decided to go with Packet8. Packet8 was good but there were some shortcomings. The voice quality was not as good as Sunrocket. Then Paccket8 didn’t allow me to fax. Packet8 sells a fax service separately and does’t give their phone subscribers the ability to send faxes.

I stayed with Packet8 for a year until my contract was over. And then switched to PhonePower, again with a free 1 year offer for $199, thanks your site.

PhonePower offers everything that I needed for a price that’s better than Packet8′s. Here are some of the things that I like about PhonePower.

2nd Free Cloned Line – I work form home, and my wife is a stay-at-home mom. So we both need to use the phone during the day. PhonePower’s 2nd cloned line sets us free. Its like having two phone lines. I can make and receive calls while my wife is on a call.  And the best thing is the 2nd cloned line is absolutely free.

Faxing – PhonePower lets you send faxes over their voip line, unlike Packet8. I don’t send a lot of faxes but it helps when I need to send a fax occasionally.

Incoming Fax – Since I work from home, I get all my work related faxes online thorough an internet fax service that my company has provided. But with PhonePower you can receive faxes in your email through your regular phone#. When someone sends a fax to your phonepower number, the phonepwer system receives it and sends the fax to your email as a pdf attachment. Works for me when I need to receive a personal fax. And this service is also free.

60 Free Minutes of International Calls every month – Though I hardly use the free international minutes, I can imagine it will be useful for someone who have friends and families overseas.

Also I would like to thank you for this site and in a way having helped me to switch to voip.

(THIS PROMOTION HAS ENDED)

There are three ways to check your PhonePower voicemail, i.e if you have PhonePower voip.

1. Online

Go to www.PhonePower.com and sign on to ‘My Account’ and within your account, there is a voicemail menu on the left hand side. You can play your messages, delete old ones from there.

2. From Your Home Phone

Dial *21 from your home phone that is connected to the Phonepower voip adapter. If you haven’t set up your voicemail before, you will be guided through the set up process. You can skip all the set up options like personal greetings, voice signature if you want to keep the defaults. Then you will be asked to set up a 4 digit pin#. After that you are all set. You call *21 from your home phone any time to go to your voicemail box and manage your voicemails.

3. From An External Phone or Cell Phone
   

Dial your phone number and once you hear the greetings, hit *to go to your voicemail, you will be asked to enter your pin and once done, you will be able to listen any new voicemails.

Last but not the least, in addition to the above three, PhonePower also offers free voicemail to email. You can  setup within your online account to have Phonepower send new voicemails to your email address. Everytime you get a voicemail, a voice file will be attached and sent to your email, which you can download and play in any audio player like windows media player or quicktime.

I use PhonePower for my home phone service and my phone service was down for a day which I didn’t realized for a day being a weekend.

So on Monday when I realized my phone service down, the first thing I did was to go the PhonePower site and fire up a chat session with their tech support. The wait was short and a tech started working on my issue immediately.

He asked me do a few things, like rebooting the phonepower adapter using a code that I dialed using my phone. That didn’t work.

Then he had me physically power down the phonepower adapter by pulling the plug out  and plugging it back in after waiting for 20 seconds. This forces the adapter to a hard reboot and help resolve issues. Unfortunately that didn’t work either and phone was still dead.

Then he said he will try one more thing from his end and if that doesn’t work, he will have to escalate the issue to the next level of tech support. He spent a few minutes on his side and then asked me restart the adapter again by powering it down and powering it back up.

Voila, that seemed to fix the issue and my phone was back up and running. I made a few outgoing calls to my cell phone and to my wife’s cell phone and a few incoming calls from my cell phone and all the calls went through.

The experience with the PhonePower tech support was was good. The tech support was friendly, patient and  knowledgeable.

And I also give the PhonePower phone service five stars. I have had very few issues with them and no complaints so far. Whenever I have had issues, like this one, they have been promptly resolved.

Phonepower voip service is one of the few voip providers to offer free faxing capability with their regular phone service plans. If you have a fax machine you can send faxes using PhonePower, just hook the fax machine to the phonepower voip adapter. With its ‘fax enabled voicemail service’, you receive incoming faxes.

And more importantly ITS FREE.

Though PhonePower doesn’t promote this feature well enough on their website, the faxing feature is there to be used. All its voip plans have the faxing feature enabled. And its free unlike other Voip providers who doesn’t offer free faxing with their phone service but sell a separate faxing plan in addition to the phone service.

Let’s look at both inbound and outbound faxing using PhonePower phone servcie.

Outbound Faxing:

1. Cost: Free with the Phone Service
2. All you need is a fax machine
3. Troubleshooting Tips: If you are having difficulty sending faxes, try sending one page at at a time instead of sending a bunch of pages together.

Inbound Faxing:

1. Cost: Free with the Phone Service.
2. How it Works: Since its a free service, the way inbound faxing works is kind of archaic though. If you are expecting incoming faxes and when the phone rings don’t pick up the phone and let it go to the PhonePower voicemail. PhonePower will retrieve the fax and will send it to your email. But you must have the PhonePower voicemail enabled.

Remember, the faxing feature that PhonePower offers is not a business fax solution. Its meant for low volume home users users who don’t send/receive a lot of faxes. There are many online fax providers, like RingCentral, who offer cheap and excellent faxing solutions for small businesses. PhonePower fax for its phone subscribers is an just an extra feature which is very handy when you need to send or receive small number faxes. Please note that many other voip providers don’t offer this service for free.