OT: PC to phone providers?

Butch

Hi,

Probably OT: Can anyone recommend PC-to-phone providers? Need to reduce by long distance calls bills...

Please rate - if possible:

- Quality of Service (voice quality, full duplex quality, echo cancellation, etc...)
- Commercial reliability (secure payments, customer services responsiveness, etc)...
- No adware, no pop-ups, no trojans

There must be good providers, but also some bucaneers out there...

I was recommended pccphone.com

Any help?

Thanks,
Butch

Tom Dunne

I'm using Stanaphone. Still have introductory 'free' credit, but call quality is surprisingly good. I will be signing up with them when it runs out. A feature of this service is that you can make calls the other way around, i.e. from normal phone to your PC. Only problem is that it the number you are assigned is a US number.

As for adware and the like - none of that here. I use SJPhone as the client software, with Stanaphone as the service provider.

Ripwave

Butch wrote:

Probably OT: Can anyone recommend PC-to-phone providers? Need to reduce by long distance calls bills...

Since I started using TeleStunt my interest in using my PC to make international calls has pretty much evaporated! Call your friend in Canada for the price of a local call!

(Think "stunt" as in "stunted growth" rather than "stunt" as in "Evel Knievel").

iwb

I've been using Skypeout for a month or so. No major complaints so far. I don't call Ireland much and it sucks when I do.
You pay by credit card and it works fine.
I call a friend in Canada every week or so and the quality is great. The odd time there is a little dropout but not much. It's hard to know if it's his mobile or Skype that's at fault. It costs less than 2c/min to call a Canadian mobile which is great.
I also call 0870 numbers in the UK and it is very expensive. Not sure exactly but my balance takes a severe hit everytime I call these. I think they are locall numbers like 1850 here.

^pt^

iwb wrote:

I've been using Skypeout for a month or so.

www.skype.com - I'm also pretty happy with it, cheap and excellent quality.

Krusty_Clown

I've also been playing around wit Skype, as have a number of work colleagues..

Comes well recommended..
No AdWare, pop-ups etc..

As mentioned above, calls to most countries are less than 2c a minute..

Eurorunner

I had looked into this some time back and using voip with 56k wasnt a feasible option. Having checked it out again, it seems that some people are reporting good results using skype via 56k connection.

Is anyone using skype (or any other voip service for that matter) via a 56k dialup connection - and if so, whats the quality of service like?

Tom Dunne

Not quite the same, but I have used Microsoft Instant messenger on 56k and it is not too bad at all.

Yahoo messenger, on the other hand, tended to be a little flaky, though I suspect that is more to do with the time of day (and therefore interweb traffic).

carrotcake

iwb wrote:

I also call 0870 numbers in the UK and it is very expensive. Not sure exactly but my balance takes a severe hit everytime I call these. I think they are locall numbers like 1850 here.

nah, they're national rate

Blaster99

Can you call Irish 1800, 1850, 1891, 1890 numbers with Skype?