Price, quality, and service are the probably the most important factors influencing the choice of a VoIP provider. Providers such as Betamax (e.g., Rynga, Jumblo, SmartVoIP) do reasonably well on price and to some extent on quality, however, their non-existent customer service renders the entire value proposition useless. Blocked accounts, billing disputes, payment issues, and overcharges are far too common in case of Betamax clones to be ignored.
Today, we will look at FastVoIP, a relatively new VoIP service provider that promises to offer all the good things that Betamax offers (cheap international VoIP calls) minus the hassles (lack of customer service). Read on to find out how you can get free international calling credits at FastVoIP.
FastVoIP offers the standard features that we have come to expect from a typical VoIP provider – low cost international calls and text messages. FastVoIP excels at offering these services at en extremely low price point. The following table will illustrate this point:
| Country | Call Rates (EUR/min) | SMS Rates (EUR) | Country | Call Rates (EUR/min) | SMS Rates (EUR) |
| Australia | 0.01 | 0.04 | Bangladesh | 0.016 | 0.04 |
| Brazil | 0.02 | 0.09 | Cameroon | 0.09 | 0.04 |
| Canada | 0.01 | 0.09 | China | 0.007 | 0.04 |
| Egypt | 0.041 | 0.04 | France | 0.01 | 0.09 |
| Germany | 0.01 | 0.07 | Ghana | 0.13 | 0.04 |
| Haiti | 0.16 | 0.05 | India | 0.005 | 0.04 |
| Nepal | 0.07 | 0.04 | Oman | 0.1 | 0.04 |
| Pakistan | 0.024 | 0.04 | Russia | 0.04 | 0.04 |
| Saudi Arabia | 0.07 | 0.04 | Singapore | 0.02 | 0.04 |
| USA | 0.005 | 0.09 | UK | 0.005 | 0.05 |
These are some of the best rates I have seen, even better than Betamax providers. Just for a comparison, Rynga offers India calling at €0.009 per minute, almost twice as much as FastVoIP. I have not seen crazy rates like these before and I will be surprised if you can find something like this. You can check their call rates table here.
FastVoIP provides SIP support to make calls. You can use the following SIP setting to configure your SIP client (follow our detailed video tutorial on how to configure x-lite soft phone or configure your SIP settings on an ATA).
Domain: fastvoip.com
Proxy: sip.fastvoip.com
Besides SIP support, FastVoIP also provides local access numbers in over 60 countries for an easy way to make calls from any landline of mobile phone. Local access numbers are currently available in:
Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium , Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France , Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy , Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Venezuela, Vietnam
Thus, you can use FastVoIP as an international calling card provider. Unfortunately, at this point, FastVoIP does not provide PIN-less dialing, so you will have to enter your card number (shown on your dashboard) to make calls. But you can always use the smart dialing trick to save the hassles of entering the PIN manually.
FastVoIP offers variety of payment options that will definitely suit your needs.
While these features are great by themselves, what truly differentiates FastVoIP from other Betamax/Dellmont clones is some level of customer service. Although the support is email-based, I should say that the company is fairly responsive. I was able to get responses to my queries fairly quickly. The company representative mentioned that they deliberately avoided phone-based support to keep the costs low, but indicated that they usually respond in less than 24 hours.
I have been using FastVoIP for a few days now and I am fairly happy with the call quality and the reliability of the service. There is no feedback or echo and I have also not noticed any billing errors.
FastVoIP provides low cost calls with acceptable level of service. Overall, I am satisfied with the service and will suggest that you consider it.
Free calling credits for TruVoIPBuzz readers:
If the already low rates are not exciting enough, here’s another deal that will make the deal even better. Just use the coupon code TRUVOIPBUZZ3 when you recharge your account and you will get 10% additional bonus credits. Just to put this into perspective, if you recharge your account for €25, you will get 500 minutes of free calls to India.
But please hurry, the coupon is valid only until 30th April, 2011. So, go ahead and create a free account now. Do not forget to spread the word so that your friends can also get free international calling credits when they top-up their accounts.