I have been spending a good week or so with some spare-time research of VoIP telephone solutions.

It’s a simple desire, really. I just want to have a phone number with voicemail and be able to make and receive local calls.

The winner is diamondcard.us with no signup fee, a $10/mo phone number with all the extras and a low pay-as-you-go rate for all of North America. I got a 1-866 number. Sweet.

They support Ekiga and Twinkle, and they are officially supported by Twinkle!  This was what led me to them.  Heck, the guy that called me to verify my credit card asked me about how I learned of them.  When I said my softphone website, he asked “Ekiga?”.  He got it wrong, but he knew about Ekiga right off the top of his head, and that’s a very good sign.

Other candidates were:

vbuzzer.com
$10, and pay-as-you-go.  Can use my own softphone.  Their website sucked, and I had to email them to get some answers.  Then their pricing was so confusing that I had to assemble a second email asking all kinds of questions.  I didn’t get a response.

netfone.ca
$10/mo for the works.  It looked very good.  But, uh, I needed to call them to clarify their supported codecs.  They had no online contact point.  I called, and I got dead air the first try. The second try I got a broken-English Indian accent message and then voicemail. FAIL.

cliconnect.com
$13/mo + pay-as-you-go.  I couldn’t find references to their codecs.  When I contacted them, I was told “the free codecs are supported”.  I can probably use my own softphone.

alldaytalk.com
$12/mo, but do they even have voicemail?

peopleline.net
$10/mo, but then they have $5/mo for voicemail.. sigh.

magicjack.com
What a cool idea.  I looked and looked and I found some people struggling with Linux solutions, including VirtualBox.  It looked possible, and I was willing to check them out when I found a Canadian version of them at canadianmagicjack.ca It doesn’t look official, plus it’s a shitty website. They’re not listed with the online Better Business Bureau.  I just didn’t trust them.  Well, they are $99/year.

comwave.net
$15/mo for crappy service. $20/mo for everything.

There were several up at $20 and even more, which I looked at but rejected.  The most hilarious one was digitalvoice.ca, who started with $14/mo with free everything and then hid a mandatory $1.50/mo for 911 and $2.95/mo for long distance calling.  No thanks.  It’s not the cost that turned me off, but the dishonesty.