Voicestick - doesn't seem to work all that well
 

After reading about it here, I signed up for Voicestick as it looked like a good service and I thought it would be helpful to use as a call through for when I visit the USA next year.

I've made a few test calls/forwarding and whilst it seems to work ok for UK landline & mobiles, it hasn't seemed to work for anything else.

I've tried to call telephone numbers in Estonia & Mexico (both landline & cellular) and never managed to get connected. Sometimes I'm given a message that the request "cannot be processed" (or words to such effect) other times there's just long silence before it hangs up.

Admittedly, I only signed up for the "next-to-nothing" account and paid only $5 in so it's hardly a financial catastrophe for me, but it's a little disappointing as it looked a good solution. Looks like I'll have to go the calling-card route after all...

I'd be interested to hear from other voicestick users to hear how reliable you've found it...

As an update to this: I've since contacted Voicestick by e-mail twice and never received a reply. Either they're having some problems or are running a bit of a poor show. Either way I'm a little disappointed and will certainly not be loading any further credit into the account.

Please email me to bnicklin@i2telecom.com

I am the VP of Marketing and would like to have your email address (when you mail me) so I can go track down why you did not get a reply.

As to UK, we just changed out to a new Gateway running from the UK to NY. The old one was having issues. This was done last week. It should help a bunch!

I call Mexico all the time on voicestick to Monterrey, their rates are dirt cheap and the connections I rarely have problems with.

Do you connect via their virtual phone or via any other sip device?

Voicestick's email is definately having problems, although that's not new.

I signed up for one of their US numbers last year, never got the welcome message, password, etc, had to email them and ask. Got the reply to that OK, and then a reply to the chase-up email to get the initial credit code.

Noticed they now had UK numbers and wanted to try one of them out. Again no welcome email or initial password. Again had to chase it up, got the password but never got the initial credit code. Gave up with it, there are many alternatives for UK numbers.

And it's not email filtering either (I have my own servers, no filters at all). Just something badly wrong with their signups, and then the support goes dead.