What is this new Vestalink (obivoice) service provider?
QBZappy:
@Newme
Welcome to the forum,
That was an interesting historical account of SunRocket. We can easily find many other examples of failed companies. Any nascent or established voip player can pull a SunRocket at any time. As detailed in your account even seasoned veterans can fail. Look around at the different voip players in the market today. Any one of these players could for different reasons pull a SunRocket despite charging more for the service. I have a Skype call out account which is charging me $30/year for unlimited (subject to fair use). Skype may have set a barometer price for voip service. A phone conversation via the Skype or sip protocol is irrelevant in the minds of most users. The ubiquitous nature of the telephone is what, in my opinion, is driving sip and all sip related paraphernalia such as ATAs and IP phones. To date it looks like Vestalink has earned the respect of their clients by demonstrating to my surprise a new level of customer support that I have yet to see elsewhere. Respect is a double edged sword. As soon as they show less humility and start being arrogant by giving us the take it or leave it attitude the sword will swing the other way. They have given their customers a sense that they have a say in how the company should evolve. Any reason for failure has been addressed directly and without hesitation. Many features have been added as a result of their customers requesting it. In general queries are promptly resolved. To their credit, the fact that they changed Obivoice to Vestalink to avoid conflict with obihai despite the fact that it seems they had rights to the name Obivoice shows the Zen like method of dealing with what ever issues that may arise.
As per PX Eliezer
( http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29072906-Am-I-The-Only-One-Who-Is-Confused-~start=60 )
Feds report:
First used in 2012.
Application for Obivoice filed by Intelafone: January 18, 2014
Abandonment Date: March 3, 2014
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4809:jzwp9u.1.1
(Do a "basic" search for Obivoice)
They have positioned themselves as a voip player open to form working relationships with both their customers and any commercial partner. How can anyone not like a company with that kind of spirit. Like I have mentioned before, the longevity of this company largely depends on the business model they have adopted and the revenue streams they are capable of sustaining. Time will tell. In the meantime every new customer they get is a vote of confidence for Vestalink.
OneForTheTeam:
I can attest to VestaLink's prompt customer service. I sense an ambition and willingness to stay for a longer run. VestaLink is growing by organically (winning each customer) and word of mouth. This is a positive thing in my opinion. But as with any person or entity, you never really know....
brossow:
Just wanted to throw in my 2¢ worth on this provider. Ever since the announcement that GV was dropping support in May, I've been looking at alternatives. When Vestalink (then Obivoice) popped up on my radar, I checked it out and signed up for a trial account. Not willing to let it overwrite my OBi202's configuration, which I discovered after signing up it wanted to do, I more or less ignored the trial and kept researching. With their warning that promo pricing was only good through the end of March, a couple days ago I bit the bullet and signed up for the two-year 2000-minute plan; I checked with them before signing up and if the 2000 minutes doesn't meet our needs (family of 5) we can upgrade for the price difference (and if the service doesn't meet our needs at all, there's a 30-day guarantee).
My impressions are varied but mostly positive:
They aren't able to port my GV number as they apparently don't have a presence in the city where my GV number is based. That's a bummer, because it means I have to forward the GV calls and spoof Caller ID in order to avoid having to change my number again (which I'm loath to do). That leads to another issue that I hadn't considered....GV forwarding works fine for the most part, but because I can't disable GV's voicemail I'm now stuck with no notification on the phone when someone has left a voicemail message. Of course, I get the notifications via email, but if I'm in a meeting or otherwise unavailable, there's no way for my wife to know that there's a message waiting for her. Really wish I'd known this ahead of time. So....Along with the above, there's no way to configure the ring time before Vestalink's voicemail kicks in. If I could configure it to kick in earlier, I could avoid the GV voicemail you can control the ring time in the account settings, but only in 10-second increments. 20 seconds is still too long to avoid GV; 10 seconds works but doesn't give enough time to answer the phone. More granularity for fine-tuning would really help. I've added a feature request for it but am not holding my breath.Their support reply times have been very quick (sometimes within minutes; never more than a day -- and yes, I've asked quite a few questions), even if they haven't given me the answers I wanted.Call quality doesn't seem as crisp as with GV. Because incoming calls are forwarded through GV, I wonder if they're passing through GV, then through Vestalink and being compressed multiple times. I'm not techy enough to know the answer to that. I'm going to try to pay more attention to outbound call quality over the next couple of weeks to see if I notice a difference. It's not unusable by any means, but even my kids have mentioned it so it's definitely not my imagination.
UPDATE: Placed a few calls last night (outgoing, obviously) that didn't go through GV and the calls were nice and clear. Either it was a transient issue or else incoming calls through GV are being double-compressed. If you're not forwarding through GV, this probably won't be an issue for you.Cost of international calls is comparable to or higher than with GV for the numbers we call (but is somewhat or even MUCH lower to some other numbers that we wouldn't be calling; for example, for some UK mobile numbers I checked, the rate was only half of GV's cost). Of course, we can go back to the old way of initiating those calls via the computer, but that really detracts from the user experience. This is important to us as my wife calls family and friends in the UK frequently. I'm just beginning to look at adding a separate provider like Localphone where she'd just have to dial something like **2 to place the call through the secondary provider, but again I'm not techy enough to know all the ins and outs of that. If there was a way to automatically route international calls dialed directly through the appropriate provider, that would be killer and would solve this issue. This is much more my limitation that Vestalink's. After more research, I've found that it's trivial to automatically route international calls through a second provider like Localphone that offers significantly lower international rates than either GV or Vestalink ... as long as you disable the functionality that automatically loads configuration from a Vestalink URL every time the device is rebooted. (It took me some time to figure out why the DigitMap kept reverting when the device restarted, which of course is required for the new DigitMap to take effect.)Speaking of international calls, Vestalink's phonebook is exceedingly basic. It doesn't have grouping, for example, and much worse from our perspective is that they assume that all numbers are US (okay, or Canada) numbers. It only supports 10-digit numbers and formats anything else as a US number. I've requested they support international numbers as well, but again not holding my breath.Overall value for money seems very good (not as good as free with GV, but GV doesn't offer E911, for example) so I don't feel I've made a bad choice.
Hope this adds more than just noise to the conversation. :)
Brent
joecandle:
I would like to make a comment on previous comments by Brossow.
I mostly dial Europe and Mexico (both landlines and cellphones) and I checked. Their International call prices are quite a bit lower than Googlevoice. What am I missing?
Thanks
brossow:
Quote from: joecandle on March 08, 2014, 09:28:55 am
I would like to make a comment on previous comments by Brossow.
I mostly dial Europe and Mexico (both landlines and cellphones) and I checked. Their International call prices are quite a bit lower than Googlevoice. What am I missing?
Thanks
I only researched relative to the numbers we actually call. All of our international calls are to the UK, which costs 2¢/minute with GV for the numbers we call and for the numbers I checked in Vestalink's rate table those calls would be 3-4¢/minute. (Some of our calls would be the same at 2¢/minute but none lower than the GV cost.) Having said that, however, those same numbers are only 1¢/minute with Localphone and while a penny here and there may not seem like much, taken in total it means that calling via Localphone cuts our overall international calling costs in half even compared with GV's or Vestalink's already low rates.
Having said that, I checked GV's rates to UK mobile phones (10¢/minute) and compared with Vestalink's rates to the same numbers and found Vestalink was only half that price (5¢/minute). For us it's a moot point because we don't call UK mobile phones, but in that case Vestalink clearly beats GV. I was not trying to do a complete across-the-board-to-every-country comparison but only reporting based on our usage, and I'll update my post to clarify that. Now, again having said that, Localphone again beats both with their rate of only 2.3¢/minute to the same UK mobile numbers (less than half of Vestalink's rate and less than a quarter of GV's).
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