I first got in to VOIP about 1 month ago. Got an Obi110 (which I returned for an Obi200), signed in to Obitalk, and started reading. Read about Vestalink, who had a free one month trial, so I first signed up with them. However, I really wanted flexible incoming call filtering to eliminate telemarketers while allowing both known and forgotten contacts to still reach us, via voicemail at least. So, Vestalink wasn't really what I wanted. Also, I didn't care about lots of free minutes, as I have unlimited cell phone use.
I saw Anveo listed as a preferred provider, and after poking around, saw that they had everything I wanted: free incoming minutes, super-flexible filtering, and free number porting (at the time). At $2/month, plus only 80 cents/month for E911, it was cheap to try, so I signed up with a monthly account and forwarded incoming calls to my existing number for testing. I also signed up for
voip.ms to try them out, as it was also very cheap.
Obitalk had no problems provisioning either one.
Now, a few words about Anveo's famous website... It really isn't that bad once you get used to their services. Of course when you have a lot more services, the web site is more complex. And some things aren't that clear, but between the obitalk forum and the dslreports forum (voip tech talk), you can get answers to all your questions. I've gotten responses from people who work at the providers, and many very knowledgeable users. Plus I've learned a lot.
When I decided I liked Anveo's services, I went through the website, and made a list of all the links with notes that I thought would be useful. I think I used it once or twice for navigation, but by then, I knew the site, and it seemed to make sense to me. Just realize that some people may have incoming but no outgoing, or may have multiple DIDs or no DIDs, etc. So everything can't be on one page, but you can get to most of it from the main control panel.
The payoff for me is I have not received even one telemarketer call since I ported over my number. I got one voicemail from a company I do business with, but no telemarketer voicemails - they normally don't bother. Friends on my contact list get through normally, and my home answering machine works normally. Unknown callers can get through if they pay attention by pressing a key to continue, or another key to leave voicemail. I have 2 blacklists: one goes right to voicemail, and the other gets the tone and recording for out of service numbers. I get an immediate email for voicemail messages.
And for the measly $2.80/month, I also get unlimited incoming and outgoing faxes, although this is a bit iffy, and is not supported so it probably can't really be counted on, although I haven't had a chance to test, and I don't really use fax much.
If you make a lot of calls outgoing, it could add up, I guess, but it's not difficult to use another service for outgoing calls.
