Best VOIP Provider

could someone tell me the best quality provider regarding signal?
also the software must be mac os

Hi Markymark and welcome to Voipuser

Thats an impossible question to answer I am afraid. Whichever provider you select will only be able to give you a connection quality that is as good as the internet connection you have at that particular moment in time. Perceived connection quality will also depend on the equipment you choose to connect with at your end.

Please do a forum search for a list of soft phones that run on a mac

gray :

Perceived connection quality will also depend on the equipment you choose to connect with at your end.

To add what Gray had already said above, the call quality also depends on the termination to PSTN gateway.

thanks for the info
would you say skype is as good as any others?
also which pstn / voip phone would anybody recommend?
i have seen the rtx dualphone and siemens dualphone
anybody have experience on this matter?

Quote:

would you say skype is as good as any others?

Skype uses different ports to SIP and may or may not be subject to different influences - there is no way to say which will work better on any setup or any network, you just have to try it.

Quote:

also which pstn / voip phone

Please read through the reviews here on the forum and remember that not all hardware that you buy specifically for Skype will transfer to any other provider.

is sip more highly regarded than skype?

There is a place for both and the debate continues !

This blog has a fairly representative assesment and provides some further reading

http://www.ampersand.com/blog/2005/04/3 ... olishness/

If you want more then a google search for 'sip or skype' throws up over three and a half million further posts. Plenty of reading to help you make up your own mind !

the link you gave me
states that since the ebay skype deal that audio quality has gone down hill
what exactly do they mean?

Quote:

since the ebay skype deal that audio quality has gone down hill

The audio quality in the latest version of Skype is nothing short of superb. I'm not a Skype fan because they're not an open standards based network. But I have to hand it to them on audio quality.

There is no substitute for trying it yourself. Most of the time audio quality relates to the quality of your own network, not the providers.

Dean

open standards?
what do you use?
do you use a dualphone?

Open Standards = SIP/IAX etc (and H323 although that's largely history now).

I have several phones - softphones and hardphones. All are SIP/IAX2 based.

what hardphones do you have that are pstn and voip?
which would you recommend?
which provider do you recommend for sip?

As several have said, the only real way to find out what is "best" is to test! Posibly the most reliable voip provider that I have used over years is MyWebcalls but that does now meant that it gives the best voice quality but rather it has not gone out of business, does not expire funds, replies to questions on their forum and seems OK with the setup that I have. I stopped using them for a while when the changed their soft client and went over to SIP....
I then changed over to Skype. Skype worked well but turned out to be rather limited in what it could do (and did not support Linux well). Also, when people on our home network booted it up it seemed to briefly freeze the network while it was setting up. I then gave up on Skype and used Vbuzzer and SipDiscount (both SIP) but they turned out to have serious limitations (for me). Now we mostly us ATA boxes to keep in contact via Voxalot. I really cannot say which provider is the best of the bunch - its your choice. If you call a lot it is probably best to use ATA boxes if you can as after the initial investment most calls for us now are free.

with an ATA box can i use sip and skype?

It is not impossible but you can generally assume that Skype needs to be run on a (running) computer.... if the computer is off then Skype will not work. Sip ATA devices are inexpensive and do not require a computer to be running (cost saving) and often give better voice quality than a soft client.