The VOIP Provider Guide

Once again, there are way too many services out there offering VoIP plans and too many options to sift through when making your decision. So, let’s take a look at one of those services that we’ve been hearing a bit about of late, Lingo VoIP. Lingo has been around for a little while now, about three years or so, and in that time they’ve done a decent job of upgrading their service every now and then and offering the kinds of features that bring in new users. But, are they more worthy than any of the other three-hundred VoIP services on the market? Let’s take a look.

First the Good Stuff
Like almost every other major service out there right now, Lingo offers everything you could want in a telephone service. It’s no longer surprising or customer winning to offer call forwarding, call waiting, or voice mail with VoIP service. It’s expected. For those companies out there that don’t offer such features, you had better catch up quickly or you won’t be around for long.

However, something that Lingo does offer above and beyond some other services is easy use of these features as well as a few other features that many companies have trouble implementing properly. Universal Phone Numbers are always a fun option that allows you to take your phone number and Lingo service anywhere in the world and keep all of your calls local to the area in which you live. Lingo offers the service and it’s actually pretty easy to use. Not only can you move your Lingo number to any country in the world, you can port your existing land line number to Lingo as well. It takes about two weeks, but it’s a great option to have.

The real draw of Lingo is the inclusion of numerous plans for different users. Depending on what you need, Lingo tends to have a pricing plan to match. Their lowest end plan is $7.99 which allows you to call anyone who uses Lingo service and use all of their standard features. For full phone service, the next plan up is the $14.99/month plan, offering 500 minutes for use anywhere in the US and Canada.

The real deal though, is the $21.95 unlimited talk plan that Lingo offers. This plan allows you to call anyone in 21 countries, most of them in Western Europe, for free. It’s a great option for anyone who likes their features.

And the Bad
On paper, Lingo is a great service with lots of different options, but in actual application, it doesn’t quite live up to its promise. Compared to many of the other services out there, including Vonage and Allo, Lingo is fairly slow in connecting calls and the call quality is often suspect. This isn’t as much of a problem for other Lingo users as those connections tend to be incredibly high quality and quick, but calling a normal land line with Lingo’s service often results in diminishing returns.

The Bottom Line
Lingo is a great service in essence, but doesn’t quite live up to its own promises. With a large company backing the service though and the promise of such incredible pricing, Lingo could easily become one of the big players in the market. Unfortunately as the field starts to thin out, those services offering the lower quality calls and poor connection times are likely to fall off the map first. Lingo is in the latter category and only time will tell if they survive it. For those people who want a good, economy option, Lingo is the way to go. For those more concerned with high quality, go with a different, better supported service.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 9:33 am and is filed under VOIP Provider Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.