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Lately they have spoken a lot about how VOIP could change telephony in the next 10 years, coming into every Italian home together with broadband services (if allowed by digital divide).

But what’s the current situation? Is VOIP already a developed and convenient service?

In this article we are going to analize Voipstunt, a Voip service provider which has already been operating for a few years and is part of the Betamax group along with its sister companies such as Voipbuster, Sipdiscount etc.

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This company’s plan is to start projects with very similar names, to provide a PC client from which a certain number of phone calls can be made to certain destinations (landline phones but calling mobile phones is not free) and then enable free calls after paying for a 10 euro plafond (+ tax).



But are they free or do they cost 10 euros? The matter is a bit more complicated, actually it is possible to make free phone calls but they are limited to 1 or 2 minutes to free destinations. To unlock the time limit it is necessary to pay the already mentioned amount which allows us to make 300 minutes of phone calls a week.

Our plafond can be used afterwards to make calls to non-free destinations which are listed and constantly updated by the service provider’s web site.

That’s it? No, it would be too easy! Our plafond enables us to make calls for 120 days (called Free days) after which we either charge 10 more euros otherwise the free destinations will be charged at the cost of about 1 euro cent/min (without other charges).

Let’s figure this out: I pay 10 euros and this way I can call free for 4 months but after that, I no longer deposit any money on my account and so I have to pay for the calls and considering the telephone charges, this allows, on the average, our credit to last for another 2 months.

This means that with an average of 2 payments a year, we can call landline phones all year long in our country and in certain foreign countries by paying 20 euros!! Extremely convenient…

So far we have mentioned that the PC client is available on Voipstunt’s website (whose functioning is similar to Skype and requires the creation of an account) but we can take advantage of its services even by using a VOIP phone and having the PC off. Now let’s see what we need.

To make VOIP calls with a normal telephone, we need to have an ADSL line and an ATA adapter. This way it will be sufficient to connect your favourite cordless to the adapter which needs to be configured by following the instructions here on this page. Once we connect our adapter to the ADSL router, we are ready to make our first phone call.

Another possibility is to buy a telephone which supports the SIP protocol (for example, Siemens Gigaset C450 IP) and connect it directly to the router so this way we can avoid the use of the adapter.

Now let’s see the impressions after using the service.

The quality of the phone calls is ,on average, excellent at any hour and if you have a router which allows you to set the Quality Of Service, it is possible to give priority to VOIP traffic and then call and do other activities on-line without changing the quality of the service.

After all, Voipstunt appears trustworthy and certainly deserves to be tested out if you are thinking about using VOIP services.

As usual, here are some books that allow you to expand on VOIPS’ world themes.

..and now you’re a bit more conscious!