[Discuss] Phone company: not redpocket.com

[Randy Cole]

voip.ms service starts at 85 cents a month for measured service, plus about
a penny a minute.  E-911 adds a buck or two iirc.  Want name lookup with
your caller id?  That adds a penny or two.  Want SMS or MMS?  That's
available at a small cost too.  Want your name listed in the White Pages
that Verizon no longer distributes anyway?  I think that is extra.
Inexpensive toll-free number option, cheap fixed-price for inbound calls
option (imagine if you have a pizzeria or some business where the number of
calls you will receive is unknown).  They even have fax line service (who
needs that other than lawyers or real estate agents?).

Located in Quebec but has servers in NY & around the country.  Some credit
card bank issuers charge a small surcharge for foreign transactions even
though the transaction is denominated in dollars!  Seems to be reliable and
has lots of options, has a $10 referral bonus program ($10 for me, $10 for
the new customer), email me if you are interested in signing up for service
lol.  They are geared towards serving businesses & technical folks, leaving
Joe Consumer to Magic Jack and Straight Talk and whatever the big box
stores are selling.

The biggest problem with SIP is getting a soft phone client to work on my
cell phone, reliably.  SIP really needs a persistent connection which is
incompatible with battery conserving techniques and suspension of
background apps.  Haven't looked at SIP clients for Linux recently, seemed
to work okay 5-6 years ago.

As for hardware, most of the reasonable ATA (analog telephone adapter) gear
seems to be deprecated and without recent security updates and I don't want
to pay what it costs for current business-grade equipment.  Phones
shouldn't cost almost as much as a computer...

On Wed, Sep 1, 2021 at 4:39 PM Dan Ritter <dsr at randomstring.org> wrote:

> MC wrote:
> > been using redpocket.com for 2 years, but within the last 2 weeks found
> > service breaking down. Any suggestions? Many thanks. MCB
>
> Assuming you want SIP VOIP services interconnecting with POTS;
> let us know if otherwise.
>
> Here's what I can tell you:
>
> voip.ms: prepay money, and spend it down. Reasonably cheap.
> Extremely chatty with their service notifications RSS feed,
> which will tell you which of their local POPs is being upgraded,
> or is being repaired, or if their customer service center is
> having a bad day. Based in Canada. At least a decade of good
> service.
>
> onsip.com, aka junction networks: would prefer to sell you
> virtual PBX services but will do SIP trunks without hesitation.
> Very reliable. Moderately expensive per-minute, but will sell
> you an all-you-can-eat per-line if you're not operating a major
> call center operation. At least 15 years of good service.
>
> 8x8, formerly Packet8: no longer does SIP trunks, but sells
> relatively cheap all-you-can-eat per-line accounts, starting
> at $12/month. Contributes money to Jitsi. The higher level plans
> include their own Jitsi servers with SLAs.
>
> -dsr-
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