Review by garryadkins 
Posted: 62 days ago
member for 62 days, 1 visits, last login: 50 days ago
 Ona,Cabell,WV
 $18 per month
 about 3 days
 "Call Quality and Support"
 "Occasional delay"
 "Very good service, very good price."
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Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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I joined callcentric in Feb, 2007 (18 months from the date of this review). Prior to that I was using Gizmo, and had poor results, so I didn't expect much.
At the time I was a newbie to home VOIP, but had some Asterisk experience and played with it as a hobby. About 4 months later, my wife and I had bought a new house and were spending time cleaning it up, repainting, etc. We had electric and water, and I wanted internet so I could view the house remotely.
Having had many many bad experiences with Verizon, I was loathe to give them any more money that I already was... So I searched around and found Callcentric. I bought a grandstream HT386 (I thought the extra FXS port would be handy, but I've never used it) and hooked it up at the new home.
I had a little difficulty with the initial setup, mostly because I didn't understand the terms and what some of the HT386 settings were (like which codecs to use and their order, Voice Frames per TX, G723 rate, etc.) At the time the documentation for the HT286 was quite a bit different. After a couple of hours playing, opening firewall ports, etc. I was UP! I went outside and disconnected the Verizon NID from Verizon's network, and plugged the GT386 into one of my open jacks... VOILA! I had phone service at every jack. I was very happy.
Call quality was spectacular! I had planned to set up an asterisk box (I had some previous asterisk experience, but no VOIP) to handle call treatments, voicemail to email, etc. But Callcentric added all those to their website, so I never bothered! Eventually we moved in (Dec 2007). I had my old Verizon number ported to my wife's cell phone, and we're legacy free!
Over the last 18 months, I've had very very few problems. One (maybe two) minor outages.
One problem I initially blamed on Callcentric but turned to be ATT Wireless. Every time I would call my cellphone from home, I would get "your call cannot be completed as dialed...". Worked fine from work and other cell phones. My dad got Vonage and he couldn't call me either... Then I knew something was up... I opened a trouble ticket, and Callcentric was all over it. We spent a couple weeks working back and forth until they finally had to give up. ATT owned the number and refused to do anything until I called. Callcentric offered a kludge, in that any time I called my cellphone, it was routed through an ATT circuit that could complete the call.
Of course when I call ATT Wireless, the phone people have NO IDEA what I was talking about. Finally I got through to tier 2 support at ATT and they reset my number "routing" and everything went away. My dad bought a new cellphone and had the same problem! I later found out that people in other states couldn't call me either.
Recently I've been experimenting with Faxing over Callcentric, and it's been a little spotty... I'm using hylafax and some older faxmodems. Turning on T.38 (supported by Callcentric, btw) helped, but I still have occasional problems completing a fax (maybe 1 of 5?) but that's probably related to my ISP (Suddenlink) I have far more trouble during the peak ISP time 8pm to 11pm.
Sometimes my wife complains about a minor delay... It's not always there but when it is, it can be annoying. An animated conversation degenerates quickly since you end up talking at the same time, then pausing, then talking again at the same time.
I recently changed from lower bandwidth codecs to ULaw and ALaw and the problem seems to have resolved. I don't know if that helps anyone else.
I also bought a Linksys "Network Optimizer for Gaming/VOIP" and put it in front of my router. (about $25) Any issues with jitter (very very few) are now completely gone. I can do anything on the internet without worry.
Hope this helps!
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