For the extra money, you get free & unlimited (as in it's included in the base price) calling to landlines in about two dozen countries including Switzerland, U.K, Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Austria, U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Spain & a bunch of other places. Included in the base rate are about 20 calling features such as voicemail, call forwarding, selective call block, call conferencing, etc. Phone numbers are unlisted by default & for that matter, I'm not even sure if there is an option to have your number put in the directory or not. They have a decent web based management page and of course being U.S. based, everything is in English. Lingo prefers that you pay by standing order from a major credit card.
Lingo works well in Switzerland (provided that you have a decent internet connection) & I know four or five other people in CH that also use lingo. I have used it myself in CH, UK, France, US & Canada, with very good results. You can set the call quality level. On the highest setting (about 90kbps), the call quality is superb and has been reliable for me. I do not work for lingo or have any financial interest in them. They do have a referral system though, so if you do choose to sign up through a referral, lingo has been crediting $25 to each party, which shows up about 90 days after you sign up. If this feature set is of interest to anyone, you can find more details at http://www.lingo.com Lingo only allows you to use a limited number of brands and models of sip adapters though & I don't know if any of those are sold in Europe. So it could possibly be problematical to order the adapter from the U.S., because so many U.S. vendors don't like to ship internationally.
I checked one vendor (Provantage) and their website ( http://www.provantage.com/d-link-systems-dvg-1402s-l~7DLNR00N.htm ) lists the SIP adapter as being 'available to the U.S. and Canada only'. I gave them a quick call though & they told me over the phone that they would ship anywhere, just warning that the warranty would be voided if the destination was other than the U.S. or Canada. Lingo themselves will tell you that they are okay with you using the adapter anywhere in the world. They do ask for a U.S. mailing address when you first sign up, but it's apparently just to satisfy a FCC regulation that there is a default service address on file should you ever dial 911 (the univeral emergency number in the U.S. & Canada, akin to 999 in the UK). Lingo has never sent anything to the U.S. address that I gave them & they are well aware that I have been & am using the adapter in Canada & Switzerland.
What am I missing here?
The requirement that you give a U.S. mailing address is a small annoyance, which is why I pointed it out, but you don't have to lie or pretend that you are in the U.S. You can tell them that you are in CH & they are okay with this. They just need a U.S. mailing address to satisfy a FCC regulation. There are tons of U.S. mail forwarding firms that can provide you with an address for this purpose. And will not even charge you anything for that unless you actually receive mail at that address. Switzernet is probably the easier & better choice for most. But depending on what countries you call most, Lingo will be more economical for some, like me.
Apart from low calling costs, the biggest benefit for me was being able to take our widely-known Swisscom Zürich numbers with us to our new apartment which is outside the Zürich phone area, instead of being forced by Swisscom to accept new numbers.
The FRITZ! can accept account details from multiple SIP providers and route calls to a particular provider based on dial prefixes (i.e. all calls dialled beginning 0044) and can of course be used with any SIP provider that offers local UK or other country numbers. Call quality is better than Swisscom analogue, and probably the best thing I can say is we forget most of the time we are using VoIP it jsut works!
RS
And that's still cheaping than calling Zurich-USA But of course if you have rellies in the good ol' US of A then them calling you locally makes sense. Some of us need a Swiss number that is not a mobile number to make calling us inexpensive
Their website and emails are a mixture of English, French and German with a preference towards French (no surprise there).
I think without the recommendation I would have given up by now, not because I don't understand the languages (I'm no expert but get the gist of it) but because the communication isn't very clear, and I'm not sure when I'll be up and running.
I'd like their website to retain English as a language choice, it seem to default to French all the time.
I'll let you know what I think of the phone service as and when I'm setup.
If I only understood English and didn't know how to configure SIP devices I think this would be near impossible for me.
http://switzernet.com/public/070723-..._UA/S675IP.php
It works fine on sipcall.ch, sipgate.co.uk and sipphone.com (ok, I'm a VoIP whore) so I'm not sure what's up.
Having looked into it more though I think my account is not active at their end, I sent them my proxy logs and await a response.
RE: My application - still waiting for Switzernet support to get back to me. I'm going to give up soon and stick with Sipcall, the service has to be ultra reliable and I need to be able to sort out problems within a few days otherwise we end up using our mobiles defeating the object of having VoIP in the first place.
Switzernet has not worked out for me unfortunately, I give up.
Sipcall.ch get my recommendation so far, they are not the cheapest but the best price/service tradeoff. I'll perhaps have a search and try some others.
I logged onto voipstunt and tried to order an incoming number.
It says no numbers currently available for Switzerland.
Have you asked them when that might become available?
thanks,
This is a bit of a bummer, since you can't now change your country if you wanted to buy an inbound number from another country either.