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I agree with you about the editors. It is amazing how little Slashdot editors seem to have learned about editing in the last 12 years. Sometimes stories have not even been spell-checked. It is very common that a Slashdot story is misleading in some way.

However, even with the sloppy editing, Slashdot is the best way of learning about computer and other technology events. It's indispensable in my life. Slashdot editors have been very good at choosing stories that are interesting to us.

The comments have often been valuable to me. For example, several years ago Slashdot ran a story I suggested about making international telephone calls. There were 880 comments. One of them mentioned BroadVoice, a company that provides unlimited calling to land lines in 57 countries (then 35 countries). Since we often call land line phones in other countries and talk for hours, that was a very valuable suggestion. (I'm only a customer. I have no other involvement with BroadVoice.)

It seems reasonable to mention also that editing is extremely mentally intensive. It is much more difficult than it appears to those with no editing experience.

We are lucky to have Slashdot. Where else could we go for these stories?

BroadVoice offers 35 countries for $28 per month.

SIP with WiFi would make it totally worth it. There are many VoIP providers which support the open SIP protocol. I use Broadvoice using their BYOD plan with a VoIP hard phone and love it.

SIP with WiFi would make it totally worth it. There are many VoIP providers which support the open SIP protocol. I use Broadvoice using their BYOD plan with a VoIP hard phone and love it.

One of the other independent VoIP's: Packet8, BroadVoice, Skype (In/Out)...

Though depending on how Vonage's saga plays out, their futures may be uncertain as well.

look at http://broadvoice.com/ pretty good service. their system is also quite open, you can byod as well.

look at http://broadvoice.com/ pretty good service. their system is also quite open, you can byod as well.

If your folks are in one of the covered 21 countries it's pretty damn hard to beat broadvoice's unlimited world for $19.95/month, or if they are in one of the other covered countries there's an expand list of countries for $24.95. No affiliation just a happy cheapskate.

Exactly. I did that too. Also try BroadVoice.com. 35 countries, no per minute charge.

However, OneSuite is indispensable. Often the voice quality is much better than VOIP calls.

If your girlfriend has broadband, try BroadVoice. She can call 35 countries for $28.27 per month.

But you're paying cell rates to tunnel through Wifi, when you could be using a VoIP carrier over wifi. That's $19.95/month for unlimited minutes vs. $100/month or so from a cell provider.

The GP seemed to think that minutes from the cell provider would be cheap or free over Wifi. This is unlikely and not indicated in the article.

Of course, you would have to buy your own phone for Wifi VoIP. At the moment they're like cell phones from 1995 and cost $200-500.

I can't offer any insight into the quality of their service, as I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but I've heard good things....

is anyone using Broadvoice?

I've switched to using http://asterisk.org/ along with http://www.broadvoice.com/rates_compare.html. I think you'll find this Wiki to be a very useful resource: http://voip-info.org/

The plan I'm using is BYOD-Lite which costs me only $6 a month and there was no activation fee, since I had my own VOIP equipment in the form of an Asterisk PBX installed on Linux. From what I can tell, they are one of the few providers who allow the use of customer supplied VoIP hardware/software, in my case Asterisk.

Something you'll have to research is what technology you want to use for hooking up individual phones to Asterisk. One possibility would be to use hardware from Digium: http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=product_categ ory&category=hardware or any other Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), or you could use Softphones installed on employee PCs such as X-Lite (free), or similar.

Good Luck!

http://www.gloryhoundz.com/

Broadvoice has somewhat unreliable service, but is free of per-minute charges to 35 countries. Cost: $25 per month. (Unlimited World Plus.)

Does anyone know of direct-connect VOIP software that will traverse a NAT? Why have a middleman? Anyway, all conversations should be encrypted, and not trackable by third parties.

Having run my own OSS PBX, Asterisk for over a year now I was able to use its Call Detail Records (CDR) database to figure out that my best bet was to use Broadvoice and its unlimited in-state plan at $9.99/mo and Voicepulse with its DirectConnect! service to pay 2.4 cents/min for all other calls. I estimate my phone bills will be around $15/mo instead of paying SBC $38 just for local service!

Not to mention that I can now take and make multiple calls simultaneously.

It's all in knowing your usage when designing a provider solution but having your own PBX also gives you the flexibility to actually mix and match.

As usualy YMMV.

The VoIP companies have to pay to terminate calls to the PSTN (Public Service Telephone Network), so free is difficult business model. They also have to provide servers, bandwidth, and pay their staffs.

A lot of people buy an ultra-lost cost plan, such as a BroadVoice BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) plan, starting at 5.95/mo, and use it with a free Xten softphone.

You don't need to buy an international plan to make international calls. Most VoIP companies allow free calling to other subs, so if you have a friend overseas, buy two $5.95 setups, and then talk forever, no additional charge. Also, with the $5.95 you get the full range of services - inbound calls, voicemail, caller id, so it's really not a bad deal.

Broadvoice http://www.broadvoice.com/ is pretty close to what you are asking for..

Unlimited calling to 35 countries including the United States:
Australia Netherlands Austria Norway Belgium Singapore Canada Spain Chile Sweden China Switzerland Denmark Taiwan France United Kingdom
Germany Ireland Vatican City
Italy Argentina Luxembourg Brazil Malaysia Czech Republic New Zealand Finland Poland Greece Portugal Israel Japan South Korea

Calls to cellphones to some of the above countries cost money though.

Working for an upcoming VoIP company, I can see where things are headed. Vonage is already connecting customers with WiFi phones. This means you have phone service, and you can use this phone anywhere there is a WiFi connection -- your office, Starbucks, or whatever.

Since this upcoming VoIP company is an offshoot of a Wireless ISP, we also get to hear all the talk about WiMAX. Intel and Nokia are teaming up to implement it on a massive scale. Assuming that the frequency licensing does not become an issue, consumers will be able to purchase true nomadic high-speed connections (with speeds probably in the vicinity of today's mid-range DSL) for roughly the same price we pay today for our broadband.

The obvious combination of these ideas is a phone that connects to a VoIP network over a nomadic WiMAX connection. $200 hardware, $50 for your internet connection, and another $25 a month for the phone service that you can take anywhere. As I posted above, at least one VoIP provider is offering unlimited international calling. Even if the rates for VoIP increase considerably, this is still well below the threshold for cost benefit.

Have you looked at BroadVoice? They have an unlimited international plan for $24.95 monthly.

If you do much calling, especially to other countries, BroadVoice seems far, far better. You do need a broadband connection. You do not need a computer. $25/month for unlimited calling to 35 nations. NO per minute charge. You get a telephone number in any U.S. state.

I've been using BroadVoice for a while now and recently trying LiveVoip and I must say I think the quality of the audio is much better than any cell phone I've ever talked on. Now if only I could take my VoIP phone in the car with me..

Also, my understanding is that BroadVoice is far better than Vonage, which annoys Slashdotters with Flash ads, as though we are like little cats and something moving will make us follow it.

BroadVoice, like Skype, works around the difficulty. If necessary, they could do everything over port 80, I understand.

Yup, BroadVoice.com is the best.

Afterthought: If you sign up for BroadVoice, it won't hurt to enter this number in the "Referred By" field: 5039145841

From the BroadVoice web site: Compare Broadvoice, Vonage, and AT&T.

From the story: "... the calculated scores don't carry much weight as they award AT&T's CallVantage the Editor's Choice and four other services strangely tie for second place."

My opinion: Be very careful about anything you see in PC Magazine. My experience is that generally the ratings are paid ads. Generally, I have found, they know the winner in advance, and pick contenders that they can rate lower.

Here's evidence: Can you find a better VOIP service than BroadVoice? (NOTE: Not BroadVox.) Why didn't PC Magazine rate that company?

It seemed to me that there was a time when PC Magazine began selling their ratings, and in the years after that the Magazine became much smaller very quickly.

Other fake comparisons on the Internet:

1) Telephone calling cards,

2) Price comparison web sites. The comparisons are just ways of convincing you to pay more. It always seems that the apparently completely honest Froogle shows lower prices.

Hell, I pay $9.95/month for unlimited in state calling (100% of calls after 4 months) with broadvoice. The only problems I have had was putting the TA in front of the firewall (random junk crashed it about twice a week) and a backhoe took out their redundant lines a couple months back. Other than that things have been awsome, voice quality is landline clear and you really can't beat the price. Initial setup was less than $70 including the TA. Long distance to anywhere in North America is 3.9 cents per minute and most of europe and asia is well under 10 cents per minute. If you make a lot of international or long distance calls they also have an unlimited anywhere in the world plan for only $19.95 plus regulatory fees. I'm not associated with them in any way, just a very satisfied customer who can't believe how cheap technology is making this stuff. Given that kind of pricing this offering from the cable co is WAY, way overpriced. But what do you expect from a cable company =)

While I realize that bundling will get them somewhere, how can they compete?

This is by no means the first wifi phone. Its cool and the price point looks pretty attractive, but if your interesting in existing technology check it out:

BroadVoice branded Wisip Phone (standards standards standards)
Pulver Innovations (unbranded) Wisip Phone (for the purists)
Cisco's sexily titled IP Phone 7920 (like they'd be behind the curve!)
and
Zyxel's Prestige 2000W

There's probably more, but thats what google coughed up for "wifi phone" tonight (in the first couple of pages..I have a life you know. Just kidding!).

BroadVoice looks interesting. Unlimited calling to 35 countries for $25/Month, it says. I just discovered it.

Background: BroadVoice is a consumer-targeted service from Convergent Networks, which offers VoIP gear/services for businesses. They're based around Boston, maybe the Rt. 128 area, I think.

Anyway, the "Unlimited World" thing costs about $20 a month (roughly what I eliminated in terms of other phone bills) and gives me unlimited calls to landlines in the US, cellphones in the 48 contiguous states, and 19 other countries scattered around the world - a fair chunk of Europe, plus Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.

For another $5 a month, I could have had their "Unlimited World Plus" plan which includes another 14 countries, but the per-minute rates to those countries are so low anyway (most are under 25 cents a minute) and I know so few people in them, if any, that I don't think I'll use enough time to make it worth it.

Once I got it set up, I picked up a wire junction (plain old boring el-cheapo kind with screws, not a 66 or 110 block) and got things wired together so that the VoIP service is on line 1 and the POTS service is on line 2 of a couple jacks in the house. There are a couple other jacks that are still POTS-only, and one of the dual-line jacks has a single-line phone so it's effectively VoIP-only for now, but it all works! (I did some diagramming in OmniGraffle before I made the changes, if you want to see.)

Being able to call 20 countries "free" is nice (my wife especially likes calling net friends in England) but another big motivating factor was the idea of being able to talk to a friend in Uganda inexpensively. ATT international long distance charged me 4 or 5 dollars a minute to call Uganda - BroadVoice charges me 14 or 15 cents. That's my kind of pricing. :) And most places in the world are about that cheap or cheaper.

Now I'm considering getting a software client for my laptop, to use when traveling. I recently discovered the horror that is "International Roaming," where I get charged as much as $2.29 a minute extra (pretty sure that's what it was in Hong Kong) for using my phone on someone else's turf. VoIP depends on IP availability, so it's not usable as many places as my mobile phone, but it'd be simpler and quite possibly cheaper than getting a SIM and a prepaid plan for every country I visit - and certainly cheaper than paying to roam internationally.

Background: BroadVoice is a consumer-targeted service from Convergent Networks, which offers VoIP gear/services for businesses. They're based around Boston, maybe the Rt. 128 area, I think.

Anyway, the "Unlimited World" thing costs about $20 a month (roughly what I eliminated in terms of other phone bills) and gives me unlimited calls to landlines in the US, cellphones in the 48 contiguous states, and 19 other countries scattered around the world - a fair chunk of Europe, plus Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.

For another $5 a month, I could have had their "Unlimited World Plus" plan which includes another 14 countries, but the per-minute rates to those countries are so low anyway (most are under 25 cents a minute) and I know so few people in them, if any, that I don't think I'll use enough time to make it worth it.

Once I got it set up, I picked up a wire junction (plain old boring el-cheapo kind with screws, not a 66 or 110 block) and got things wired together so that the VoIP service is on line 1 and the POTS service is on line 2 of a couple jacks in the house. There are a couple other jacks that are still POTS-only, and one of the dual-line jacks has a single-line phone so it's effectively VoIP-only for now, but it all works! (I did some diagramming in OmniGraffle before I made the changes, if you want to see.)

Being able to call 20 countries "free" is nice (my wife especially likes calling net friends in England) but another big motivating factor was the idea of being able to talk to a friend in Uganda inexpensively. ATT international long distance charged me 4 or 5 dollars a minute to call Uganda - BroadVoice charges me 14 or 15 cents. That's my kind of pricing. :) And most places in the world are about that cheap or cheaper.

Now I'm considering getting a software client for my laptop, to use when traveling. I recently discovered the horror that is "International Roaming," where I get charged as much as $2.29 a minute extra (pretty sure that's what it was in Hong Kong) for using my phone on someone else's turf. VoIP depends on IP availability, so it's not usable as many places as my mobile phone, but it'd be simpler and quite possibly cheaper than getting a SIM and a prepaid plan for every country I visit - and certainly cheaper than paying to roam internationally.

Background: BroadVoice is a consumer-targeted service from Convergent Networks, which offers VoIP gear/services for businesses. They're based around Boston, maybe the Rt. 128 area, I think.

Anyway, the "Unlimited World" thing costs about $20 a month (roughly what I eliminated in terms of other phone bills) and gives me unlimited calls to landlines in the US, cellphones in the 48 contiguous states, and 19 other countries scattered around the world - a fair chunk of Europe, plus Canada, Chile, China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia.

For another $5 a month, I could have had their "Unlimited World Plus" plan which includes another 14 countries, but the per-minute rates to those countries are so low anyway (most are under 25 cents a minute) and I know so few people in them, if any, that I don't think I'll use enough time to make it worth it.

Once I got it set up, I picked up a wire junction (plain old boring el-cheapo kind with screws, not a 66 or 110 block) and got things wired together so that the VoIP service is on line 1 and the POTS service is on line 2 of a couple jacks in the house. There are a couple other jacks that are still POTS-only, and one of the dual-line jacks has a single-line phone so it's effectively VoIP-only for now, but it all works! (I did some diagramming in OmniGraffle before I made the changes, if you want to see.)

Being able to call 20 countries "free" is nice (my wife especially likes calling net friends in England) but another big motivating factor was the idea of being able to talk to a friend in Uganda inexpensively. ATT international long distance charged me 4 or 5 dollars a minute to call Uganda - BroadVoice charges me 14 or 15 cents. That's my kind of pricing. :) And most places in the world are about that cheap or cheaper.

Now I'm considering getting a software client for my laptop, to use when traveling. I recently discovered the horror that is "International Roaming," where I get charged as much as $2.29 a minute extra (pretty sure that's what it was in Hong Kong) for using my phone on someone else's turf. VoIP depends on IP availability, so it's not usable as many places as my mobile phone, but it'd be simpler and quite possibly cheaper than getting a SIM and a prepaid plan for every country I visit - and certainly cheaper than paying to roam internationally.

I would like to be able to have DID (Direct Inward Dialing) however I have not found a VOIP company that supports that.

I currently use BroadVoice which does not. I hear VoicePulse might be able to provide that service but I have not tried yet.

Get VoIP service from broadvoice, they offer unlimited in-state calling for ~$12/month (9.95 + some fees) with an initial setup of only ~$70 and out of state calls costing only 3.9 cents per minute anywhere in the US and Canada. International rates are lower than anywhere else I've seen. I'm not afiliated with them other than being a satisfied customer.

This has been around for months. And is not bound to proprietary standards, having a computer running, or even being at home! I am so fookin tired of all the Skype hype! "As Seen on TV" used to be the phrase. Now it is more like "Ware doo eye klik?"... ooh, pretty colors!

I've been doing a lot of research for the past 2 day and the Wisip phones are what your talking about. I've been drooling ever since I saw it.

Since SIP phones seem to be pretty damn cool (open standards, I guess companies like Lingo and Packet8 use proprietary hardware which can spell limited choices and hardware lock-in) Wisip phones seem to be the way to go (it helps that they've got that tech-fetishist look going on too!).

Pulver Innovatoins
Xiologix

An added bonus of using a SIP based service is you can use plain old computer hardware to connect too, which means even if you don't have the extra change for the Wisip, you can schlep your laptop with you and when you plug it into a (broadband) network you can access your phone, make calls, etc.

I don't know anything about any of that though, because I just started doing research. Maybe someone can jump in, I'm curious how well (or not) this all works.

So far my favorite company seems to be BroadVoice. Anyone have any experience? Is Vonage SIP based?

I've been doing a lot of research for the past 2 day and the Wisip phones are what your talking about. I've been drooling ever since I saw it.

Since SIP phones seem to be pretty damn cool (open standards, I guess companies like Lingo and Packet8 use proprietary hardware which can spell limited choices and hardware lock-in) Wisip phones seem to be the way to go (it helps that they've got that tech-fetishist look going on too!).

Pulver Innovatoins
Xiologix

An added bonus of using a SIP based service is you can use plain old computer hardware to connect too, which means even if you don't have the extra change for the Wisip, you can schlep your laptop with you and when you plug it into a (broadband) network you can access your phone, make calls, etc.

I don't know anything about any of that though, because I just started doing research. Maybe someone can jump in, I'm curious how well (or not) this all works.

So far my favorite company seems to be BroadVoice. Anyone have any experience? Is Vonage SIP based?

VOIP is now offering increadible value, and that's sure to drive uptake. are offering unlimited calls in North America and to most of Europe for $20 a month. It's also mostly compatible with asterisk (other than an ongoing voicemail problem I think), so makes a lovely linux project and saves cash at the same time.

Well thats all well but broadvoice charges $20/mo. I've been using them since August and have been very happy.

Broadvoice+Sipura from voxilla+asterisk=awsome home phone system.

Well thats all well but broadvoice charges $20/mo. I've been using them since August and have been very happy.

Broadvoice+Sipura from voxilla+asterisk=awsome home phone system.

Must not have searched very hard...

BroadVoice $10 a month for DID and unlimited calls in-state. $20 a month for DID and unlimited calls to the US/Canada. ibell.us $0.015 a minute calls to the US, no monthly fee.

Don't forget Broadvoice. It works too and is really cheap.

Chris

I don't know about other VoIP providers, but Packet8.net has been great for me. I've had friends use the phone at my house and explain to them that they need to dial 1+area code+number and then when they get off the phone I tell them the call went over the internet.

Usually, they are surprised that it wasn't a "real" phone conversation. I have sold a lot of people on it because it's only 20 bucks a month. I'm switching to BroadVoice when they have area codes in my state, because they give you the SIP username/password so you can use Asterisk Linux PBX.

Chris