Voipfone
Does anyone know much about Voipfone or similar services?
I want a service for my business which has a UK geographical number but can transfer callers through to my office in France without them noticing and without them being charged at International rates. Voipfone seems to offer this and come recommended for call clarity on a Voip specific forum but I know many Spec-chums are good with advanced technology and wonder whether any of your know anything bad about Voipfone or recommend any similar services. I don't want the clarity of the call to be compromised if I make this changeover and I would like a service that looks proofed (inasmuch as anything can be proofed) against deterioration in quality or by lack of service in the future.
I want a service for my business which has a UK geographical number but can transfer callers through to my office in France without them noticing and without them being charged at International rates. Voipfone seems to offer this and come recommended for call clarity on a Voip specific forum but I know many Spec-chums are good with advanced technology and wonder whether any of your know anything bad about Voipfone or recommend any similar services. I don't want the clarity of the call to be compromised if I make this changeover and I would like a service that looks proofed (inasmuch as anything can be proofed) against deterioration in quality or by lack of service in the future.
Post edited by Jumping Stack on
Comments
Check out Skype perhaps?
As for the actual details of the service you're requesting, I'm not sure if Coms.com offer them, but they might be worth contacting.
Skype is no or low cost but limited, Nortel (or similar) are vastly expensive but provide systems that can jump through as many hoops as you want.
Your best solution probably depends on if your willing to fork out for a VoIP telephone system (expensive and needs good network infrastructure to work well) or if you want cheap and nasty in which case your looking at Skype (or similar) where you run the VoIP through your PC and rely on third party's for your routing - or in skypes recent "accident" lack of routing.
This is definitely a case of the more you pay the more you get.
Also - From what I have seen in "real" VoIP setups (1000's of users) is that bandwidth becomes critical very quickly. Both up and down speeds can give you issues if your on a normal "home" connection.
Also Part 2 - One serious problem I have seen relates directly to call forwarding.
Pleb in UK phones up helpdesk in India. India prat about and forward the problem to second line. Second line gives up and passes the call to third line. By this time Pleb still has perfect connection but third line almost always gets a very poor connection even if they are in the next room to the pleb in the UK. In fact second line sees a serious degradation of quality, again with pleb appearing to have a perfect line. Although this could be a bad routing issue the phrase "going round the world a couple of times" comes to mind if you try and do this.
From what I have seen in big commercial setups there is still some work to be done on the subject.
ADJB
I'll second the vote for Skype...
I've used it for months now, with no real problems... (although coincidentally, there was a brief outage this week, but that's resolved now - first one since I started using it).
Andrew
I've been using the SkypeIn feature to get a geographical number for incoming calls for well over a year.
Colin.
Hardware, Software, Magazines and more for the SAM Coupé
Website: www.samcoupe.com
Twitter: QuazarSamCoupe