----> Please note the correct name of the company is Virtualphoneline.com, I made an error in the title.
OK folks after seeing the ad by their rep a couple of days ago, I thought I would give this a shot, the rates are definately attractive enough
So I signed up...the service is still being launched so expect some rough edges on Pakistantel.net..(OK a lot of rough edges, but they are very responsive and are working on it).
They are a offering from supertec which has been around for a while and runs DIDX which is place where VOIP companys buy and sell DIDs as well as virtualphoneline.com and several other voip companies. The founder of the company is a Pakistan entrepreneur, you can google and find out about them....The bottom line is that they seem to be a reputable company which has a history with VOIP, not a fly by night nothing to lose operation.
The system is under development, infact their ad said they wanted people to help them this it out. Be warned that the service and has a lot of rough edges, to the point that the customer service rep had to help me add the credit card and purchase the DID. So if you are the kind of person who gets easily frustrated, I would suggest you wait, but with the kind of prices they are offering, this could be an attractive offering, it may be worth it. So I think we should give them a reasonable amount of time to get it going, before we start giving them strong critisism. But it shouldn't go on and on like Braintel.
You have to get the customer service to setup SIP forwarding, the UI on the site only lets you forward the number to pstn, gtalk, msn, or yahoo talk. If they think that SIP is confusing for may people, may be they can put an advanced button and put the sip options there. Having to contact customer service for this is silly.
One a very important note: they don't offer sip registration, only sip forwarding to an AIX or SIP uri. which is fine becuase they are selling a inbound service, their rates to Pakistan are not competitive for outgoing (more than 8c/min). So as long as you get a SIP provider that can accept an incoming sip calls from outside you can register to them and then setup forwarding.
I tried several sip URIs, which work from everywhere else I have used them from, but couldn't make them work with their service. Finally got my callcentric uri to work. This could be serious for some people, I suspect they are using SRV records for DNS resolutions, or it could be they have a bum DNS server. I have spent quite a few lines on this but I think they need to understand that this is an important subject for this audience.
The encouraging thing is that the customer service is very helpful and the managment seems commited to making it a viable product. They took a few hrs to get back to me, but the CSR helped me every step of the way and worked very hard to make sure I was setup....I will give them 4 stars for CS. Not 5 because although the rep was very helpful for administrative type things, and getting me setup etc, he couldn't resolve why the sip forwarding to my viatalk number or my asterisk which has a dyndns.org address doesn't work.
Another interesting thing about the service is that although they advertise $6.95/month for DIDs they actually have better rates than than if you pay by the year especially in the smaller cities. For example the DID I purchased was $19.95/yr for a Hyderabad DID. All DIDs come with 5000 free incoming minutes, and its $0.011 per minute after that. I don't see how anyone would cross 5000 mins of incoming, if it was truly used for residential use.
Not bad, I think if the quality is good, I would gladly suffer a broken website for this kind of pricing (actually a broken web-site would prevent all but the most resileint from signing up, so not so good for the company, but maybe good for the customers since the severs won't get overloaded
)..
I will keep everyone updated and let you know how things go... By the time we got everything setup it got too late to call anyone in Pakistan, so we will find out the quality of the service tommorow.
Pakistantel.net and Virtualphoneline.com 
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