Voip on the iPhone

I’ve used VOIP for about 5 years now.  I was with Vonage for a few years but switched to Voipo 2 years ago.  It’s a long story, but I didn’t want to change my business number and Voipo has call forwarding for $3/month and many of the other services promising cheap call forwarding were folding right and left.  I switched to using their full blown and whopping $18/mo plan a year ago.  I like the online controls of Vonage much better, but as a whole the quality of Voipo is as good as Vonage and Voipo keeps adding features without raising my price.  Although the vPanel isn’t easy to navigate, when I do check it out I realize they have added the ability to simulring (ringing my cell phone # and my VOIP line at the same time so if I’m in the office I can answer my office phone and if I’m out I can answer on my cell) which is the key feature from Vonage I missed most.  Voipo allowed me to easily forward all calls to my cell, but that meant if I stepped out for a quick errand I had to forward my calls before I left and change it back when I got home.

Get to the point already, Grace!

So, I just now realized I can use the BYOD (bring your own device) settings from Voipo to use a SIP client on my iPhone.  I always thought I needed Skype, but when I used Skype on my cell phone on a great Wifi connection I kept getting dropped on my conference call and my cell signal where I was didn’t yield better results.  Since I like to try before I buy I’m currently using Media5-phone since it’s free.  It registers with Voipo just fine and I get calls to my office phone and on Media5 simultaneously, but when I answered on my office phone, Media5 kept ringing for minutes on end which was quite annoying.  Also, my iPhone battery seems to drain faster.

I do like being able to return calls from my office line instead of my cell line since I prefer to not give out my cell line, but if I use this extensively I will most likely need to purchase codecs to allow better call quality over 3G or maybe just a better SIP client.

Acrobits seems to come up the most in online discussions and it’s $6.99 in the iTunes store

Bria also is highly recommended and is $7.99 in iTunes.

I always got confused since buying these apps is equivalent to buying a phone, just because you have a phone does not mean you have service.  I just now realized I’ve had service all along!  If I find that I am using the VOIP account more than my normal cell phone I might just go ahead and purchase Acrobits and the G.729 codec (apparently the codec is still proprietary and requires a license for use) to get better quality over 3G.  Best of all, I can call home from abroad and not have to worry about Skype credit anymore!