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.

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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.

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Skype is offering 15% off on its SkypeOut plan.
Unlimited US & Canada Calls any time of the day, any day of the week. There is no long-term contract. No connection fees.

Includes free Voice mail included with your subscription.

How Much Does it Cost?

$2.99/month for the USA Plan (Unlimited calls to US, Canada, PR, Guam)

$7.99/month for the North America Plan (Unlimited calls to US, Canada, PR, Guam, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey landlines only)

$13.99/month for the North America Plan (Unlimited calls to US, Canada, PR, Guam, Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey landlines only & 40 other countries)

Subscribe Now.

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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)

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

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.

$9.95/mo first three months, $23.95/mo from month four onwards. Unlimited US and Canada calls. Standard voip phone service features.

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Phone.com, a leading business voip phone service provider,   has a brand-new promotion effective immediately featuring a FREE Vanity Toll-Free number for new customers (expires July 31st):

Get Your Free Vanity Toll-Free Number when you sign-up with Phone Services from Phone.com!

Use Coupon Code: FREEVANITY at Checkout

A vanity number is a toll free number that also corresponds to a word which is easy to remember. So you can advertise the word combination of your vanity number. Numbers are difficult to remember, but a word combination like 1-800-MyStore (not be a real number) is much easier to remember.

A vanity number is easier to brand and easier to market and used by businesses of sizes.

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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.

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The Lingo Smart Talk Plan offers unlimited calling in USA, Canada and also includes unlimited calls to 35 countries including India.

The plan costs $9.95/month for the first 3 months and $21.95/month afterwards. All start up fees like , set up fee, shipping fee and equipment(Voip Adapter) fee are being waived as a promotional offer. You can try in risk free for 30 days and requires a 1 year contract.

We have tested Lingo for its call quality in USA and Canada and to India and find it satisfactory.

You can get more details about the Lingo Smart talk plan and also the Lingo Hello America plan (which is an unlimited calling plan in US/Canada with no international calling) in our Lingo Review page.

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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)

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Ringcentral mobile recently made some changes without changing the cost of their service.

Each RingCentral Mobile plan now offers more minutes and more extensions, at the same old monthly rate.

The RingCentral mobile Pro plan now has 300 included minutes (up from 100), 10 virtual extensions (up from 5) and the additional minutes now cost 4.9¢/min (down from 6.7¢).

The RingCentral mobile Plus plan now has 1000 included minutes (up from 500), unlimited virtual extensions (up from 10) and the additional minutes now cost 4.4¢/min (down from 5.9¢).

The RingCentral mobile Power plan now has 1500 included minutes (up from 1000), unlimited virtual extensions (up from 10) and the additional minutes now cost 4.2¢/min (down from 4.8¢).

All these added benefits makes RingCentral extremely competitive compared to other virtual voip phone service providers. Here is a side by side comparison of small biz voip service providers.

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If you call Philippines often, you can get 60 Free Minutes added to your balance as a welcome bonus when you sign up and  make the first deposit with Rebtel.

Calling rate to the Philippines with Rebtel is 10.9 ¢/min.

To get the free 60 minutes use the following code while signing up.

Voucher code: pinoy60
The offer is valid until July 31

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