Good service with callwithus.com

[rosaryshop]

I'm almost hesitant to tell this because I think part of what makes callwithus good is that they aren't too busy. But I believe in giving credit where it is due.

I'm new to VOIP, but have been building web and network servers for about 10 years. Until recently our phones came with a T1 provisioned by our local ISP, but my business has been a little slow and $450 per month was becoming a painful check to write for the T1 and phone service. So I switched to Comcast business cable and plunged into the VOIP waters.

I run a small business from a busy home. We have four lines hardwired. Tried Sunrocket for a few weeks. No real problems with the service, until I asked to port our four numbers over. Our local provider was happy to assist, but this was clearly just WAY too complicated for Sunrocket to deal with. 10 e-mails and faxes later, they still couldn't get it right, and I moved on. Tried Skype for awhile. Played with the USB to RJ11 adapters. All worked fine except there isn't a slick way to wire it into our installed lines without dedicating a computer -- well, several computers or a server if we want four lines -- to Skype. That just seemed overcomplicated and ultimately expensive. The truth is if they had a good way to integrate with installed lines that didn't require dedicating a computer for each line or building another server, I wouldn't have looked any farther.

Gizmo Project looked promising. I bought a PAP2TNA, opened up two Gizmo accounts, and configured the PAP2 using the voxilla config tool. Sound quality was noticeably worse than Skype or Sunrocket. Otherwise it all worked fine... for about six hours. We purchased CallIn numbers. The Gizmo site said they were for "Oregon." I should have thought a little about that, because only later did I realize that they were for PORTLAND, Oregon (40 miles away). Now our neighbors and in-laws would have to pay long distance to call us from across town. We were willing to live with that (because my wife liked the number she chose for the home) until we bought CallOut credits. A couple hours later the home account went dead. Neither the Gizmo softphone nor the PAP2 could log in to the home account. Couldn't login online either. Gizmo took the CallOut purchase money, then killed the account. I've sent about three support tickets in the last few days without a response, and can't login to the forums to get any help that way. Their site keeps on saying it is having SQL errors (which, in my line of work, is a sign that a company is circling the bowl).

Contacted les.net but they have no DIDs in our area. Otherwise, they look good, too. They recommended an 800DID, which might be a good idea for our business.

By that point a few weeks had passed and my wife was a little displeased at the results of my money-saving efforts. I was crimping her phone use, you see, and the novelty of choosing new phone numbers was long gone. But still I had the PAP2, and I don't like to give up, so went looking for another BYOD provider. After some searching I came upon callwithus.com, and figured I'd give it a shot. Signed up. Changed about four entries in the PAP2TNA. Sent some PayPal funds to cover a local DID, and less than a day later it was all up and running.

It is presently a little over a penny per minute for calls in the USA, which is about all I ever do. Unless one is doing an absurd amount of calls, it seems like most VOIP prices are so low that they are practically irrelevant compared to the service options and support availability. The owner actually responds to questions, usually within a few hours (sometimes minutes). Unlike other services, you can set up multiple SIP accounts/devices on the same personal account, and they'll draw collectively from deposited funds. This is really convenient for our situation. Gizmo and Skype both freak out if you even try to use the same credit card on two different accounts.

It isn't as idiot proof as Skype, but there is more help there than on bare bones providers. I actually like that it is more a cafeteria style. We have our own internal voice mail system, so I don't need to pay for that. And so on.

So far, so good.

Seth Murray