My parents are interested in the VOIP package Shaw is offering, which will be 55$/mo for 1000 international minutes after the 30$/mo 3 month trial.
I recall when VOIP technology was first being widely introduced in the heady technology atmosphere of '99, and it seemed calls were going to be practically free. 55$/mo seems like quite a bit, even if our current POTS provider is charging 70$/mo after long-distance fees.
Looking around, I’m not sure if there’s anything better. 24$/mo seems to be the rock-bottom range available, and for that you don’t get any long distance at all; for slightly more, you only get North American LD.
Can anyone recommend a cheaper service that will allow at least 750 minutes to the UK, or is this as good as anyone is offering right now?
Isn’t Vonage offering Canadian packages for around $20 per month?
One thing to be aware of: Rogers just started capping total data transfer on their cable internet packages at 60 gigs*/month on everything but their Extreme (6 megabits/second) package. They say that VoiP data is included in that total. Unless you get Rogers’ own VoiP service, of course.
Might be a good idea to check to see whether Shaw is doing the same.
My friend Mike the Networking Wizard claims that a VoiP connection is less than 64 kilobytes per second, so the total amount of data transferred by a month of internet phoning is almost negligiable in a 60-gug total, but i’d be aware of it anyways.
[sub]*Rogers says this is over 61,000 megabytes per month, so I think they’re using true binary gigabyres of 1024^3 bytes, but be safe and assume 60 billion bytes.[/sub]
As far as I can tell from their page, the 20$/mo package Vonage is offering applies only to calls within North America, hence my OP.
As for data transfer, I’m far more concerned with possible latency issues than overall bandwith useage. From a random and small selection of whitepapers I just looked up, the most expensive VOIP encoding peaks at 80 kb/s, which translates to only 35MB/hour, an amount I can (and often do! :D) blow in minutes on a good BitTorrent download.
60G? And here I was worried when I got over 20G… perhaps Shaw is more generous than I’ve imagined?
If the person you want to call has a broadband connection, you could use Skype which is free. If they don’t have it, you can use SkypeOut which has some pretty reasonable long distance rates.
Would you really use 1000 minutes a month? If you got something like yak.com’s service or vonage and just paid the 2-3c a minute charge, would you save money?
I’d look at my past bills and see what you have used and match that to a plan offered by a VOIP company.
55/mo sounds pretty steap to me, btw. I use Vonage 14.95/mo USD plan and like it just fine.
I’ve been told the minutes seem to be around the 750 mark, but as far as I can tell, the long-distance rate to the U.K. is 6c/minute for both yak and Vonage, which seeing as that’s the rate my parents get on their real phone already, doesn’t seem like a money saver.
I’d vaguely heard of Skype, but while my parents might just be able to use something like that if nothing went wrong, I’m sure my grandmother would have problems. (Despite the 386-powered knitting machine she handles better than I could).