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- Average user rating: 4.5 stars out of 10 reviews Back to product review
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4 out of 4 people found this review helpful
5.0 stars
"Best free VoIP service"
Pros: Just works, great community, peering with most other networks
Cons: none so far
Summary: For broadband users FWD is a great free service - specially with free peering (access via a prefix) to some of the most popular VoIP networks, like Packet8, Broadvoice, and SipPhone. I have purchased IP phones from FWD and installed them overseas, where I have friends with broadband access, well over one year ago. I'm talking to them daily, and the initial investment paid back long ago - no charges whatsover, and perfect voice quality, for thousands upon thousands of minutes. Grandstream Budget Tone IP phones sold by FWD support low bandwidth codecs, like G723, iLBC and G729, which makes them work on bandwidth equivalent to dial up connections, for point to point connections. FWD works fine over dialup, if you have a high compression codec.
FWD was the first VoIP service I tried, and its tutorials and support formus made the whole experience painless.
You can get free "normal phone" numbers associated with your FWD number, so friends can call you directly (www.ipkall.com), and there are local phone numbers to access the network (gateways) in most major markets in the US, and quite a few overseas as well. For dialing out to the normal PSTN, you can get either a toll free credit card, or buy minutes from ICH (delta three), and just dial a prefix to access your IConnectHere account.
Since FWD is an "open" network, it can be accessed from most other SIP service providers, which is a very big plus for me. For example, I have my 2c/min toll free number from nufone.net linked to my FWD number, so I can get toll free calls from US48 on my IP phone for 2c/min, and no monthly fees. You can also permanently forward your FWD number to any other number on another "open" network, like mutualphone.com, and dial out for 1.2c/min (US48), while still receiving calls on your FWD number.
While it is less reliable then normal phone service (it was down for about two hours in the past year while my SBC phone line was up for the past 10 years), it is good enough to rely on. Given the ***FREE*** price, you would expect less, but FWD service has exceeded my expectations by far. I am using two FWD lines with "hard" IP phones - they are just extra lines for day to day use. I am still keeping one regular phone line for 911 and incoming DSL service, but have replaced two additional phone lines with FWD service (and a third phone line with fax to email service from maxemail.com).
If your router supports STUN (Linksys WRT54, Netgear RP614, RT314, etc.), there is no latency introduced by FWD - RTP (Real Time Protocol, or the voice packets) go directly from your router to the guy you are talking to, and the latency is given by the network latency between your two nodes. If your router does not support STUN (most symetric routers have this issue), FWD still works, using a "voice gateway" to go around the problem. This workaround forces RTP packets in both directions to travel through the voice gateway, which does add latency, and under heavy load, specially if the gateway is poorly located, latency may become an issue. This however has nothing to do with FWD - any SIP service provider using voice gateways has the same issue, and the solution, as mentioned above is to use STUN compatible routers.
