Near the beginning of 2008, I published VoIP providers for home use, where I listed my favorite telephony service providers, some of which I have now abandoned because they no longer exist, are no longer cheap, or something better came along. Here are my current choices.
CallCentric – Last time, I said I was just starting to use CallCentric‘s services. As of this month, I’m just ending more than two years with them. I had a DID and used them for some incoming calls and redundant 911 service. I have no complaints; I’m canceling because I no longer need the services. CallCentric is pretty slick and has excellent technical support, fairly low rates for DID (but 2c/min. for outbound domestic calls, which is about double what many others offer), a nice incoming FAX option, super reliability and excellent sound quality. From my location, they often had the lowest latency of any provider I was using. Pay with credit card or PayPal. Oh, and here’s a neat trick: I found that CallCentric DIDs don’t seem to obey the privacy bit on incoming calls. So if someone sets the privacy bit to block their caller ID, you still get it. Probably a misconfiguration, but it could be helpful if you want or need that.
CallWithUs – My current favorite termination provider, to anywhere. I first looked into CallWithUs as a cheap provider for international calling and found that their domestic rates are excellent, too. Their web site speaks of their “keep it simple, stupid” business philosophy and I find that to be another great reason to work with them. Pay with credit card or PayPal, prepaid only. They also offer PBX hosting and VPN connections for low costs, neither of which I have used but would definitely try if I needed one of those services.
Sipgate – Sipgate’s One service offers a free DID in California with unlimited inbound. Front-end that with a Google Voice DID in your area and now you’ve got a free local DID on its own trunk for use however you like. Sipgate has one of the coolest web dashboards I have seen, FAX services (inbound free), and the ability to register multiple devices to their service, which could be useful. I haven’t used any of their paid services yet. My connection to Sipgate has roughly 120 ms latency but little if any jitter, so the quality is fine.
Gizmo5 – I’m still using the Gizmo5 connection with a Google Voice number routing over it, but you can’t sign up for a Gizmo5 account anymore, and web speculators think it’ll be rolled into a Google Voice+SIP offering at some point.
And there’s more…
Google Voice isn’t really a provider but has already received a few mentions above. I’ll have a post dedicated to GV soon. Stay tuned also for a post on XLink, which has been a valuable part of my home VoIP setup for a couple years now.