VOIP Choices

You know it is going to be an interesting day when you spot your wife scowling at a telephone bill. Some times our bill is a mile long and the figure at the end appears to have been confused with the national debt of a small country.

I’m not having an affair or calling dodgy premium lines. Honest!

Part of my work involves a fair amount of time on the telephone. This is fine for consulting calls as the client pays me well for them, but lately I have been doing a lot of interviews since our book and my course were launched.

When you have to pay for your own transatlantic calls that can last an hour or more, you start looking into better options for telephone service!

Of course the first place I turn is Skype, which is brilliant in many ways, especially because I can record, but all too often on calls that go on a while the sound breaks up or drops me entirely, especially over long distances. This is not good in live interviews.

Even though I live in the UK where we are a fair bit behind the US, there are still a confusing array of alternative VOIP service options.

The problem is how to work out the good from the bad? Will any of them be any better than Skype?

Please let me know if you have any recommendations in the comments …

Posted on October 2, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under IT

Comments

3 Responses to “VOIP Choices”

  1. Nancy on October 2nd, 2008 9:29 pm

    I’d like to know if anyone has tried the Magic Jack. I’m seriously thinking of using that. The yearly cost is much lower than any other VoIP options that I’ve seen.

  2. Claudia on October 10th, 2008 4:50 am

    This is so interesting, everyone is at a loss! Well, I knew nothing of Skype but like Microsoft, it is an industry standard and I decided to go with what everyone is using since it might be easier to connect. Turns out that it’s hard to load up, macs hate it and thereis a great diversity of people out there using other stuff. For a while I had really enjoyed Grandcentral until Google decided it was going to charge. Their stocks went up and that’s just not cool in this economy. I am tempted to go with Gizmo to try it out for a bit. At this point, I’m headign back to my calling cards for important business and go with msn or yahoo teleconferencing when I can.

  3. Al on November 8th, 2008 3:16 am

    gradwell.co.uk — ability to port numbers is nice, plus lots of other features (full hosted voip pabx, basically); works with sip and pots; good support; didn’t like my old internet connection (or old dsl modem, with a snom handset) but very happy with current. might be a bit too techie for some.

Leave a Reply