A little review on VoipStunt - a voice over IP service provider

I started to use VoipStunt (www.voipstunt.com) since January 26th this year after Bigzoo went dead and the use of OneSuite for a short period of time. The most attractive feature? Calling to the landlines in China, US and many other destinations for free. Sort of.

OK, you will need to open an account with them and buy credits in the increment of 10 EUROs, payable with credit cards. The current term is "If you buy credit, you will get 120 Freedays (unless stated otherwise). This means you can call all countries in the free destinations list for 120 days at no costs. When the 120 days are over, you will keep your credit, and a minimal rate (for instance 1 cent/minute) will be charged for the free destinations (this rate depends on the country and will one of these days be displayed on the rates page). "

It has a CallBack feature. With this feature, VoipStunt first call to your phone. After you pick up the phone, VoipStunt connects the other end, your destination phone. A connection fee of 5 cents in euros applies in this case.

The quality varies when calling from computers. I feel that it works better with a wired internet connection than a wireless one. The quality is always good when using the CallBack feature since both sides are connected to the network through phone lines. This phenomenan might be due to the incompatibility of hardwares. VoipStunt offers free trial calls on its homepage. You may try the quality out there.

One account can be shared by a number of friends or among family members. If your family members understand English and have an internet connection, they can use the same account in their residence country, say China, as well.

One feature I would like to have is to make a phone call at a time appointed. For example, I could set up the phone call to take place in 5 minutes. Then after 5 minutes, my phone would ring and VoipStunt then connected my destination phone for me. With this feature, I could set up the phone call and receive the call back from VoipStunt through one single phone line. This is useful when I only have a phone line and I use dial-up internet connection. Hopefully, VoipStunt will offer this feature in near future. Moreover, interfaces in other languages rather than English would be helpful for attracting potential users who don't know English.

There should be no technical obstacle for a third party to offer these two features with an additional layer of interface between the end users and VoipStunt.There are many other similar service providers. VoipCheap, VoipBuster, to name a few. VoipStunt even has ads for FreeCall (www.freecall.com) in their client-end application. It is said that most of them come from the same company. Probably they are just testing different business models under different names.

One downside so far: some of my phone calls to mobile phones in China have been charged extra amount of money, which shouldn't happen since mobile phones in China are supposed to be free according to the terms at VoipStunt. Their customer service is very limited. It's hard to reach them and get a refund. I would suggest to stick with phone calls to landline.