Voip Deals Blog

Unless you are making a lot international calls every month and just need a phone service just for calls in US/Canada, there are some good alternatives to Vonage. We like Vonage because of its unlimited calls to 60 countries, but many don’t require international calling plans. Here are some of the Vonage alternatives to consider.

Excellent phone service with many free features.Unlimited calls in the US/Canada (and 60 free international minutes). Most of the time has a FREE ONE YEAR promo going on. Free 2nd cloned line, free soft phone. Free fax plus all the standard features like voice mail, call waiting, call forwarding, E911 and others. Cost: $199/yr (free 2nd year with the promo offer). PhonePower Reveiw

Lingo Unlimited World plan at $21.95/mo. Unlimited calls to 45 countries including India, China, Mexico, UK , US and Canada. Standard voip phone service features. Free activation, free equipment, no contract. Lingo Voip Review

$195/Yr Free Set Up, No contract. Unlimited calls in the US/Canada. Visual Voicemail, 3 way conference.Intalk Nextiva Review

Phone service suitable for home and small businesses. Unlimited calls in US/Canada. Costs $214.56/Yr or $19.88/month. Business phone features like click-to-call, simultaneous ring. Phone.com Review

I recently read an article in a forum where a user was complaining about his difficulty in getting a basic voip home phone service that was easy on the pocket, from a reliable voip service provider and had unlimited incoming minutes. He also needed to port his existing phone number. He or anyone in his family won’t need the service to make outgoing calls since all of them have cell phones. His frustration was he wasn’t able find a service that he liked.

So with this prospective voip buyer in mind we went shopping. And here is what we came up with.

Requirements

1. Unlimited Incoming
2. Cheap
3. Existing Phone Number Porting
4. Minimum Outgoing Minutes
5. Regular phone features like Voicemail, Call Waiting etc

Voip providers that offer plans for our need are summarized below. Considering everything that these plans offer Lingo Hello America 250 plan looks to be a better option. The reason being Lingo is the only provider which waves activation fee and shipping & handling fees, includes free 250 outgoing minutes every month and satisfies all our requirements.

Lingo Hello America 250

• $7.95/month, FREE Activation & Free S+H
• Unlimited Incoming minutes & 250 Outgoing minutes for calling in US/Canada
• Voice mail, Call waiting

Joi Phone

• $9.95/mo ($6.95/m if paid lump sum for a year), $30 Activation Fee, $24.95 S+H
• Unlimited Incoming minutes & 100 Outgoing minutes for calling in US/Canada
• Voice mail, Call waiting

Phone.com

• $9.88/month,  $29.95+ $9.95 Activation fee& S+H
• Unlimited Incoming calls, 250 minutes free Outgoing calls in the US/Canada
• Voicemail, Call waiting, Simultaneous ring and many features.

Well, that’s a very good question. Here we have compiled a list many different situations and the phone services that will be suitable for each with a little humor.

1. I am always on the Phone making calls

Any plans on cutting back.. if not, you need a phone service with unlimited calls in the US/Canada. Most voip phone service offer unlimited calling plans. We like PhonePower, see why?

2. I travel a Lot

Watch your diet, those calories add up fast. And choose a phone service that offers a soft phone service which can travel with your PC. PhonePower offers a FREE soft phone service. So you can take your phone with you, and your family will still have the regular phone at home.

MajicJack is another option. Though it doesn’t have a softphone option, the jack is tiny enough to travel with you hassle free. It won’t require an extra seat on the plane.

Another option is SkypeOut. With skype Out you get to make unlimited calls in the US/Canada for as little as $2.99/month.

3. I hardly make any calls

Why no friends . Opt for a limited minutes phone plan like JoiPhone ($6.95/mo for 100 free minutes), Vonage Lite ($9.99/mo for 200 free minutes) or JoiPhone. You can receive unlimited calls. And you will get some free outgoing minutes for the occasional calls that you will need to make.

4. I work from Home

Lucky you. Go with PhonePower. You get unlimited calling in US, Canada, free incoming fax, outgoing fax (if you have a fax machine), free 2nd cloned line, free soft phone.

5. My wife and I both work from home

We feel your pain . You can lessen it with the free 2nd cloned line from PhonePower. The 2nd cloned line acts like a 2nd line which can both receive calls when the main line is in use. Just plug a 2nd phone to the phonepower adapter and you are set.  More on how to set up the 2nd cloned line.

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.

Intalk offers a business voip phone service that’s great for both residential customers as well as small businesses and SOHO.

Some of the features the plan offers are aimed toward small businesses, but are ok to have on residential plans too.

Features like simultaneous ring (rings your cell phone, office phone and home phone together), Find Me, Follow Me, Visual Voicemail, Click to Call (have a button on your blog/web site for users to click and call you), Call Hold. Plus you get all the regular features like Call Waiting, Caller Id,  Voicemail to Email, E911 and last but not the list UNLIMITED CALLING.

InTalk has two payment options for the same plan. The InTalk yearly payment plan is $195 a year, paid yearly and the monthly payemnt plan is $19.95/month. Both are affordable plans and are similar to or lower than other voip pland offered by Vonage, PhonePower, Lingo and others.

Recently voip provider Vonage has quietly added a new tier of voip plan called Vonage Pro. Its a higher priced plan at $34.99/month and packs a few more services to its residential unlimited plan.

The added features are

• Vonage Companion – Its basically a softphone using which you can make and receive calls from your pc.
• Vonage Visual Voicemails – A voicemail transcription service that converts your voice mail to text so you can read the voicemail in your email or on your cell phone. You get 25 free with this plan.
• 25 Directory Assistance calls

For the above three features you pay extra $10 per month. The soft phone feature may be something that road warriors will like. With the softphone, you travel with your phone anywhere you can access internet, from the airport, from your hotel or office. For regular home phone users these features may not add much value, but then Vonage may not be targeting this group with this plan.

Please note with the Vonage Pro plan you get all the features of the Vonage Residential Unlimited plan, like unlimited local and long distance calls in US, Canada & PR, FREE calls to landline phones in Italy, France, Spain, UK and Ireland and 25 calling Free features. Also you get 1 FREE MONTH.

PhonePower‘s 1 Free Year offer is back for a limited time. With the prepaid 1 year Plan at $199/yr you get one additional year of service for Free.

PhonePower is an up and coming voip home phone service provider with excellent call quality and all the free features that you would expect.

If you are looking for a home phone service provider, do consider PhonePower. Just try it for a month. If you don’t like the service, cancel before the 30 day period. All PhonePower plans come with a 30 day money back gurantee.

Read our full PhonePower Review here.

Ooma is new type of Voip Service significantly different from the other voip providers like Vonage, Lingo or Packet8. For lack of any better terms, lets call its Voip 2.0. The main difference for the consumer who doesn’t want to dabble in the technology behind is, it’s not a service that you pay for monthly or yearly. Rather what you buy is a Ooma hub and pay for teh device only once. Once set up the hub will let you make unlimited calls in the US for free .

That sounds too good to be true. So where is the catch….

There is no catch actually, except for the fact that the cost of the device is a bit high, at $349 after mail in rebate. But thta’s not why the calls are free. Ooma uses peer-to-peer Internet system popularized by file-sharing sites. So your device after connected to the internet is like a node (or a computer) in the Ooma network and your box can also carry another Ooma user’s call through it. But don’t worry, that is totally transparent to you and you will not hear, know or notice other calls being carried through your device. This is called peer-to-peer networking and is the main resaon why Ooma calls are and will be free.

That’s not all. The Ooma hub can be used with your regular phone line. If you want to keep a very basic land line for emergencies or back up, Ooma can work with it too. You keep a regular land line with a very basic service. And if or when Ooma service fails , the device will seamlessly switch to your regular line.
So where do you get the phone# from

If you choose to keep your land line and use Ooma with it, then your land line number provided by your carrier is your phone number. If you want to use Ooma as your primary carrier, then Ooma will provide with a phone number for free.
Fro the consumer point of view, you pay once for the device and then make unlimited calls in the Us and there is no monthly, yearly bills to pay.

There must be a risk somewhere, right! Yes, there is. You are paying around $350 hoping never to pay for any US calls again. But that is contingent upon the existence Ooma as a company. This is a bitter truth for stand alone voip companies. Many previous Sunrocket users have lived through it. So that’s your risk. You will need at least one and half year of service to recoup your initial cost. After that its all free for you. You will be envy of all in your neighboourhood as some one who makes free long distance calls.

Go to Ooma for more pricing details.