Speakeasy VoIP Service

I recently ordered Speakeasy's VoIP service, and I'm really happy with it so far. The gist is that I pay $24 a month for unlimited national calling (plus the United States of Canada). It also comes with all of the phone features that usually cost extra, like caller ID, call waiting, voicemail, multi-party calls, and so on.

Even better, all of this stuff can be managed through a web-based interface. I can get logs of all my incoming and outgoing calls and get voicemails as wav files. Voceimail is also available through the phone itself. I can receive faxes too, but I haven't tried it yet.

The phone can be set to various states, like "away", "at work", and so on. Incoming calls are treated differently based on the current state. Even more fine-grained control is possible by setting up groups of callers to be treated differently in each state. The web app is a bit on the slow side right now, though tolerable.

There are various other niceties, such as the fact that the online address book dictates which names show up in the caller ID display.

The voice quality has been very good so far. I can't accurately judge quality while I'm downloading big files since I'm waiting to be moved to a less busy circuit. In theory, Speakeasy's service can prioritize voice packets over general data.

I considered using something like Skype instead, but I wanted a real phone as opposed to something that required a computer to be on. I'm not sure I'm willing to completely replace the "real" phone line with this, since I don't want the internet to take my phone down with it.

Bottom line: I'm expecting significant cost savings on my mobile bill and already enjoy the web-based features.

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I had to temporarily disable comments due to spam. I'll re-enable them soon.