Lately I’ve been wanting to get rid of the home phone, but I hate doing long conversations on the cell (and I really don’t want to pay for a lot of air time minutes), so I started looking into getting some VOIP action up in here. After reading reviews at BroadbandReports, I decided to take a little bit of risk, and went with Lingo, a relatively new provider in the space, but apparently backed by a good size Canadian phone company, Primus.
The initial setup was pretty painless, and it almost seemed to work out of the box. However, I was not able to hear anyone talking for some reason. After a couple of days of troubleshooting, I got it working tonight, and it’s very cool. It’s $24.99 a month for unlimited calls in the US, Canada, and Western Europe (not to mention the first 3 months are free). Also another cool thing, you can add ‘local’ numbers to your plan anywhere in the US for $5 a month, or locations in Western Europe for $10 a month. I think that’s really cool.
Since I got it working pretty late tonight, I haven’t made many calls with it, but it seems decent so far. I made a short call to Germany earlier, and it seemed to do just fine. I’ll post a follow-up in a few weeks once I get around to switching my regular number over, have made some calls with it, etc.
Nice! Welcome to VOIP! I’ve been a vonage customer for about 3 months now, and love it…
Except for calling grenada, but who really calls grenada besides me?
Hey Greg, how’s it going?
Yeah, I also looked at Vonage as there are ads for it everywhere, and people seem to have a good opnion of it. I finally decided that Lingo seemed like it would work the best for me, and thus far I’m pretty happy with it.
I made a longer call to Germany early this morning and it seemed to work just as well as a normal call (at least on my end). I’ve done VOIP in the past with calling cards, Net2Phone circa 1999, etc, but the technolology seems to be improving by leaps and bounds.
The only thing Lingo doesn’t have that I wished they did was an option to check voice mail online. I do have it notify my cell phone and e-mail address, but still it would be nice to check it while I’m online without having to pick-up the phone.