Simple Rate and Service Plan Comparison at VOIPAdvisor.org
Overall Review of VOIPAdvisor.org
Overall VOIPAdvisor.org is put together in a fairly efficient and compact manner. There are only three pages that I could identify within this site. The homepage is the page that has the majority of useful information, and the average person looking for some very basic comparison information on these five VOIP service providers will be well served by visiting.
The site is designed with large, easy to read text, and there are not a lot of excessive write-ups about technology that will make your eyes cross and start to blur within two or three minutes.
On the downside, I did not buy the argument that user reviews are without merit and I think the site would benefit from gathering together more user reviews of VOIP services. If I’m utilizing an advisor to determine why I should use a particular service:
- I’d like to know what the potential pitfalls of the service are,
- where the benefits of the service are and
- what are the best ways to use the service and get the most for my money.
It’s been my experience that people that have actually used services of any kind are going to be the best source of information for this type of information. Dismissing user reviews is a mistake.
Compares VOIP Services
Compares 5 VOIP providers
VOIPadvisor.org provides comparisons for five different VOIP services. They specifically cover Vonage, VOIP.com, lingo, via:talk, and packet8. Noticeably absent from the equation is Skype. [Ed’s note: Skype is a different type of VoIP service than these.]
Regardless, the website does a very good job of breaking down a detailed price and service comparison for these five services. They cover everything from the monthly plans to the yearly rates to fees for additional lines and activation fees.
In addition they talk about some examples of rate plans for international calling, shipping fees, cancellation fees and many of the basic features that come with each of these plans which include:
- Voicemail
- caller ID
- call forwarding
- three-way calling
- enhanced 911
The site then provides recommendations based on a five star rating schema. Their highest rating being five stars. I don’t mean to steal their thunder, but they recommend VOIP.com above all the others.
VOIP Reviews (Not Present?)
In addition to the main page of the website, the site only offers up two other pages. The first of these pages is the section titled VOIP Reviews.
Now oddly enough, when you click on this page you’ll be greeted with the introduction that VOIP reviews are overrated and that you should disregard what you might read from actual users or people that actually utilize VOIP services.
Why? Because supposedly these reviews are typically skewed when people that are upset about the services write about them.
Now there is a certain degree of logic to this perspective but not enough to dismiss user reviews. People do tend to write reviews when they’re upset or when something hasn’t quite worked out. Other people do write reviews in an attempt to be very objective and give a larger picture of what’s going on with a particular service. But it’s the passionate people that tend to outweigh the voice of everyone else, excluding reviews pushed out by the actual corporations schilling their products.
For this particular site, I find it somewhat odd that they don’t offer up any user reviews under the section titled VOIP Reviews. I look at it like they should either provide the reviews, or drop the section altogether. Instead they opt for trying to explain to people why they should ignore reviews in the first place.
As I mentioned there is a little logic to that, however there is definitely value in reading reviews even when there stacked on the negative side of things. I believe that it helps consumers prepare for the potential issues that they might be confronted with in those exceptional circumstances and be prepared to deal with those issues more successfully than the people that were originally dealt a bad hand.
Why Switch to VOIP Services?
The final section of this website provides about 10 reasons why there is an advantage to using VOIP services. They also provide two reasons why there are disadvantages to using VOIP.
After reading their review section (or their lack of a review section), I find this third section to be a little under whelming and it could use some more details. This is potentially exactly the type of section where it would be beneficial to have some of those positive user reviews. People could detail why they made the switch over to VOIP and that might reinforce the message of the website owner, possibly even increasing the websites credibility!
[Editor’s note: This is a paid review sourced from ReviewMe.com. We make no claims or guarantees for VOIPAdvisors.org.]
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October 1st, 2007 at 11:07 pm
I used to think that VoIP was VoIP, but that’s not true. While I sell VoIP, I’ve also used their services for travel abroad, my personal home service and my business. During the last few years I’ve used 3 different VoIP companies, and that’s not counting Skype. All of these services worked at least as well as a cell phone, and most of the time they worked a whole lot better.
The coolest one was a service I found at a big telecommunications show in Vegas a couple of years ago, and that was a service called Voice Stick. They loaded your number on a 100 meg USB drive, and you could plug it into any computer to make calls around the world.
In 2005, I was in Mexico for a month and used Voicestick like crazy. To make calls, I would just go to a bar, bookstore or McDonalds with free WiFi, put on my headset, and call my customers in the United states for like 1.5 cents per minute. That sure beats the heck out of the $4.00 per minute my hotel wanted to charge me for the same call.
I could also receive calls from anywhere. I have a Voicestick telephone number from the San Francisco area, and if anyone called that number, my computer would ring if I was online.
For my home, I’ve used Packet8 and Zingotel, and found them to both be pretty good services. I fried my Zingotel router a couple of months ago though, and I still haven’t been able to get the new router working.
For business, I had a Packet8 account for a couple of years, and that was cool. I have a Nevada corporation and address, but live in another state. With Packet8, I had a Las Vegas number, so that it didn’t look funky having people calling a number that didn’t match the state. (Of course, only other telecom people would have even noticed.) The other thing to remember about VoIP, is that you can have a toll free number ring to it just like you can to any other line. So, if you have toll free numbers coming in to your office, you can keep them and just route the calls to your VoIP phones.
I would recommend any of these services since they have all worked for me. They also have good customer service, which I think is really important for a VoIP phone company, since it is a little more technical than your regular plain old telephone service.
October 16th, 2007 at 12:53 am
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