Free International Calls

We make a lot of telephone calls to both Ukraine and Russia which costs us much more per month than Orange Broadband would cost, is the free International Calls part of Orange Broadband working well or not worth considering as an option.

I telephone Australia on a regular basis and voip phone works with no problems reported with this talk service.

Russia and Ukraine telephone calls would be free on orange broadband unlimited pakage.
http://www.orange.co.uk/time/livebox/destination_list.htm

Thanks westyinwales, Orange appear to be the only company offering free International Calls to so many countries, although I am sure there must be some restrictions on the amount of calls that can be made in a month. I am tempted to move to Orange just for these calls, but I am worried about moving my broadband from a monthly contract with a good ISP, to a 12 month contract with Orange who have not had the best reputation for quality of service, although I have been told it is improving.

They have a fair use policy on the calls and put a specific limit on international calls. It's 1000 minutes each month though which is a heck of alot, I shouldn't think you use as much as that??

"4.10 The Talk Service is subject at all times to a Fair Use Policy which includes limitations on outgoing international calls to 1,000 (one thousand) minutes on each account every month to a total of no more than 100 different international telephone numbers. Any use of the Talk Service for outgoing international calls above these limitations will contravene this Fair Use Policy and constitute an abuse of the Talk Service which may result in our monitoring usage and withdrawing the Talk Service from your account."

As for the VOIP calls they're pretty good but I find sometimes you make a call and you can hear the other person but they can't hear you so have to hang up and try again. I don't know if that would be a problem with the livebox or whether any (upload) bandwidth being used by the computer effects it.

Thanks for the info Guys, the VOIP service sounds tempting, what is the rest of the package like?

It may be worth staying with your existing ISP and looking at something like Skype for VOIP.

I joined in september, and it started off great. top speeds (6.7mb) all day long.

now, its gone rubbish, an i get 0.7k all day long. wowsers.

the calls feature is the only redeeming feature. however, i'd be tempted to either use a call overide provider or voip on another service. If the latter, I'd think about investing in a voip router, so that you can plug in a standard phone and use internet calling as you do with Orange, but without orange.

Or, if you have an orange mobile contract anyway, then its only a fiver...

Thanks for the info. I use Skype for user to user calls, but they are not so cheap for landline calls to non users in Ukraine. I use 0844 providers at the moment and they are OK but BT are soon to charge a 6p connection charge to these calls, so I was looking for a cheaper alternative.

I can only speak for myself but apart from a few days at the beginning of May by broadband speeds are top notch so far in about the 4 months I've been with Orange now. 6.2mb normal speed dipping to around 3-5mb evening peak time. Actually since Orange had what seemed to be nationwide speed problems for a while in May my peak time speeds have been better since they fixed that problem. Also they don't throttle torrents (yet anyway) which is good I don't use them that much but good to know it will download quickly then before when I was with Pipex and a torrent wouldn't go faster then 20kb/s.

I'm not on LLU though and it sounds a bit hit and miss. For

Edited by notawhizzkid (Wed 11-Jul-07 13:09:51)

Might be worth checking out 18185

Russian Federation Fixed 1p per min (plus 0.4p connection charge)
Russian Federation Mobile 3 p per min " " " " )

Ukraine 5p and 10p respectively

I use them to call friend in Bucharest regularly - good service and no contract - just charged to your CC monthly

Edited by zebedee (Thu 12-Jul-07 19:55:44)