 Review by Styvas 
UPDATED: 30 days ago
member for 4 years, 2123 visits, last login: a few hours ago
 Edmonton,AB
 $30 per month
 about 7 days
 "Decent call quality, AirMiles reward miles, good value for money"
 "Calls into tech support or customer service often a long wait; ISP problems can sometimes hit Primus service hard"
 "The service and price are excellent, and Primus takes performance/quality issues seriously"
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My Other Reviews ·Shaw
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I have the Unlimited bundle at $29.95. This includes all calling features and unlimited long distance within Canada and the US. International long distance rates with this bundle are competitive, but not drastically so (ironically, Primus' rate for the country I call the most is the highest of the various Canadian VoIP companies). Other similar Canadian services charge on average a bit more for the same package but some of these offer more calling features. However, they do not give AirMiles.
Currently Primus provides customers with a D-Link DVG-1120M MGCP VoIP gateway, or a Linksys SPA2100/2102 that operates on the SIP protocol (I believe all new signups receive the Linksys). The D-Link is adequate but it lacks many of the functions available on even the cheapest routers. It is also supposed to do LAN-based QoS in order to maintain call quality, but this function seldom (if ever) seems to kick in. The Linksys offers slightly better router functionality, however call quality does not appear to differ significantly from the D-Link. Call quality for the Primus service in general is good as long as the local ISP is not experiencing problems. Primus uses the G.711 and G.729 codecs, the choice of which is user configurable.
My only other significant complaint is to do with call centre wait times. It is fairly typical to wait for 40-60 minutes or more to reach a customer support rep. Tech support wait times, however, have significantly improved in the past months. If you are calling on your cell phone because your VoIP phone is not working, that can be extremely frustrating and expensive. The free SkypeOut to toll-free numbers may solve this problem for those without a cell phone to call Customer Service or Tech Support.
In recent weeks (Summer 2008) , Primus seems to have been hit with a number of outages and other problems. While they seem to take these seriously and service is restored quite quickly, it does leave me a bit reticent to recommend their service to anyone who requires 99.9999% reliability (even landlines go down from time to time). Perhaps their customer base has outpaced their ability to keep up, or perhaps competition has forced them to cut costs to the point where quality is affected. I don't know, but I hope they can get back to the stellar service that I've enjoyed for 4 years now.
Not having tried any of the other Canadian VoIP services (Vonage, Yak, Spectravoice, etc.) I can not recommend any of the others. However, I would say that the Primus offering is worth giving it a try. Barring some serious degradation in the overall service, or an increase in pricing, I will be continuing as a Primus customer for the foreseeable future.
For more information you can check out Primus' website (»www.primustel.ca) or the »Primus TalkBroadband VoIP FAQ.
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