Yet another player has entered the Internet telephoney market competing with Skype to be the next generation communication tool of choice. VoipBuster specialises in cheep international calls to landline phones using the Internet. How cheap? Very cheap. Currently advertised at “FREE” although there is a $1 Euro account creation fee, it’s hard to compete with those rates if you currently call any of these countries -
| Australia Austria Belgium Canada China Czech Republic Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Ireland |
Italy Luxembourg Netherlands Norway Poland Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan United Kingdom United States |
Skype Journal: VoipBuster is another small phone client that you download to your PC. It’s not particularly flashy. After you enter a contact you can just click and dial their PSTN number. All numbers are in the international format. +CCareanumber. Apparently there is no PC to PC calling capability. Thus all calls are routed back through the PSTN. It works just like you would expect it to work. Audio and general quality is fine. I tried it on a broadband line. So what we have is a dialer, no chat functionality, no conference calling, no presence infomation, no mute button. So this is stripped down. Just like the old telephone. Plus like Skype when you call a PSTN number there is no caller ID sent. Where’s this product going? I don’t know I sent some questions to VoipBuster support.
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Wow…that is cool…but how they expect to make any money? As long as it remains free I will use it to call my gf in kingston ontario canada.
Hmm… Do you honestly think that it will stay free for ever?
Their business model is surely to grab attention and users during their “beta”, 1 Euro period.
Then they will switch to standard Skype rates, possibly 10% lower. Just the cynic in me…
Still, all competition is good for us humble customers!
David, yes I agree. I can’t imagine they will sustain a business with a free service and it’s certainly ambitions if they are starting out this late with a dot.com-esque mad grab for clients at any cost – even running at a loss. That’s a recipe for failure.
But I’ll take the free calls as long as they are free…weeeeeee
Not a bad deal… But have you checked out FireFly? http://www.freshtel.net
Great VOIP, better quality sound, free voicemail, the only downside at the moment is there is no ability to dial in.
Cheap rates too, 6.9c per minute to regional Australia, 10c flat rate to capital cities (if you’re a member)
Have used Skype, but prefer FireFly.