Over the past few weeks I have been trialling a VoIP provider I hadn’t noticed in New Zealand before, 2talk, and I have been very impressed.
Usually I would write this the other way around, and rave on for a bit then talk about my experience, but in the interests in not boring you too much I will skip to the review. Update: Because this post got far too long, I actually split into two posts.
My experience has been absolutely flawless, every call perfect quality, no dropped calls or degraded quality. I signed up for the $15/month personal plan, in which you get 500 minutes and two NZ numbers. I used one of my allocated numbers for an 0800 number, and signed up for a local Greymouth number, so I could call my parents without even using any of my minutes (“local” calls are free).
After a slight muddle with passwords when I first signed up (I hadn’t read the thing telling me not to put symbols in my passwords) I was up and running within 15 minutes, including the time to download a SIP client for Mac. I’m using X-Lite at the moment.
I called myself on the landline, to check out the delay (It is pretty bad usually when I do it with Skype), it was totally insignificant, much less delay than a call to a mobile. They have a very featured web control panel to help set up auto attendants, call forwarding, voicemail, you name it they have it – even wake up calls. Obviously if I was going to do it seriously I would buy a SIP phone so I didn’t have to have the software open on my computer.
I should mention that I have a fibre connection back to Snap which I get around 17Mbps up and down on, so I am not exactly trialling it on an average NZers connection. I’m hoping to give the service a try at work over the summer break, where I will move a few of the lines going into our PABX over to 2talk and see how it goes.
(My ping to sip.2talk.co.nz at the moment is ~18ms)
I would highly recommend giving this a try. I just signed up for a month to give it a go because it was so exciting, I won’t be keeping the service as I am a student so unfortunately can’t quite justify it.
I can’t help but thinking how great it would be if I went travelling overseas etc, get a nice phone with a SIP client and wifi, sign up with a local number in NZ, and call all I like for practically nothing.
Let me know how you get on!
2 Comments
The service is terrible
They make you call an 028 number for their phone service (so if you have config issues like me you get stiffed) and they dont reply to their support email address.
Avoid 2talk if you can – try another viop service
Good point Hugh, I hadn’t noticed they only had an 028 support number. You could try ringing them in the middle of the night, it sounds like they have an answer machine, they will then return your call and save you having to pay mobile call rates from a landline..
I do agree that they could be a little better at replying to (or replying more quickly) support emails, but I haven’t had anything I’ve needed an urgent reply for yet.