Free Calls to Chinese Landlines

[gougou]

There is a VOIP program that allows you to make free calls to Chinese landlines: http://www.voipstunt.com/en/index.html. Quality is better than Skype.

[lokki]

Would be interesting to know what you mean by "quality". If you mean sound quality, clearly a voip application cannot possibly have better quality when calling landlines than the landlines themselves with their limitations. The sound quality found in Skype is well above that limit and cannot be bettered by any other app in that sense.

[imron]

Skype is also a VOIP app. I use it regularly and love it, but its quality is nowhere near as good as a landline. Calling between Australia and China (from computer to landline), I'll frequently get echoes or slight delays and usually at least one or two dropouts for longer calls (longer than say 10 minutes). Not that I'm complaining, because for less than 2 jiao a minute, I'm more than happy to put up with such short-comings. Quality is of course quite subjective, but if something can do better for even less, then why not try it.

That being said, their website doesn't seem to be too clear on how many 'free' days you get when you first sign up for an account, however it mentions that once your 'free' days run out, you get more by buying credit, which doesn't sound exactly free to me :-) Have you been using them gougou? Exactly how free is free, and for how long does it stay free?

[imron]

Also, this voicestunt seems to have much higher rates than skype for its "non-free" regions. Compare calling a Chinese mobile - € 0.02 with skype, and € 0.15 with voicestunt.

[liuzhou]

I read that as "free calls for Chinese land mines!"

Must be the baijiu!

[gougou]

I've just started using this one, before I used another program from the same company called VoipBuster (same concept, slightly different list of countries - doesn't include China). It did seem a bit dubious to me first as well, but everything worked out (under the policy of the other program, you had to charge your account to get any free calls, which worked as promised).

VoipStunt I've been using only for a couple of days now, and have just reached the limit yesterday evening after posting: in total (without charging my account) I got two free days. On the first, I called to a landlines three times for a total of about 7 minutes, and to a mobile for one minute (which was cut off after that due to having run out of free days), on the second day I called to a landline for an hour before being cut off, again stating that I was out of free days.

About quality: the people I've been calling said that I was better to understand using that program than using Skype. For myself, the differences in quality were less perceptible. One thing that did not happen was the frequent drop-outs you get in Skype.

All in all I am very happy with this program and am going to charge my account. While some calling rates to non-free destinations are more expensive than with Skype, even if you have to call these (for my needs, the list of free destinations is quite comprehensive) or have to call in excess of the free time granted, I think overall you should end up paying less.

@Imron: Where did you find 15 cents for Chinese mobiles? I guess you mistook it for Chile? It says free here (which is contradicting what they say on the front page, and 1 cent (after having used up your free minutes) here. I do seem to recall it saying something like 1.07 cents/min when I did that one minute call (which didn't bother me, cause I didn't have any money on my account )

[imron]

yep, I read the Chile one by mistake - though I could have sworn it didn't have the Chinese Mobile and Landline rate together when I checked earlier today.

The fact that it doesn't drop out as often as Skype is probably enough reason to make me try it when my Skype credit runs out.

[gougou]

One more thing I just realized: if you want to charge your account, you have to verify a real phone number (they call you, you type in a verification code they give you on the webpage).

[lokki]

It makes little sense to speak of quality without specifying what kind of quality is meant.

Landlines come nowhere near the near-hifi sound quality you get on Skype as such ie. computer to computer, talking specifically about _quality of sound_ while it is working without disturbances. Again, when you dial a landline from Skype this sound quality will be throttled back by the rather poor performance of the landlines in that department.

But your equipment will play a part. If you experience sound quality as poor over Skype you might want to check what quality your sound card, earphones and microphone are.

Dropouts and jitter are a different matter, caused by disturbances in the flow of ip packets in the network. I haven't tried the one you mention but it is hard to see how one app could be any better than another for that, since none of them will be able to reproduce sound correctly if the correct ip packets don't come flowing over the network at the right moments. For this aspect land lines are of course better than voip since they don't tend to have these problems at all.

Still, there is one point where one voip app can be better than another: the access points from ip to landline. If these are better than skype's in some geographical area, that might result in fewer disturbances and higher quality service for voip to landline operation to those areas.

[gougou]

When talking about quality, I was referring to dropouts or strong echos - anything that can make you not understand your counterpart. As I rarely call in on the Cleveland Philharmonic, hifi audio quality is not a must for my calls, but dropouts are an annoying feature of a VOIP call.

About these - I am no expert on VOIP telephony, but wouldn't a provider with plenty of users have more problems delivering data (think bandwidth) than a relatively new one? (Hmm, if this was true, maybe I should delete this thread again... )

[imron]

Lokki, the sound quality of Skype varies drastically depending on the country you want to call to. From China, calling to the US or the UK, I get excellent sound quality. However when calling to other places with weaker internet infrastructure, the quality of the sound rapidly deteriorates (increased echos, tinniness, delays). It's not the headphone, mike or soundcard, but rather as you mentioned the access points from ip to landline. Out of all my calling experience, I've found calling Spain (where my sister lives) to have the worst overall sound quality and the largest incidence of dropped calls (compared with US, UK, Finland, Australia and China, which are the other countries I call).

Also, if a whole bunch of packets go missing, you don't need to drop the call, you just need to drop that bunch of packets, and disregard them if and when they eventually come in out of order. Sure you'd miss a part of what the person was saying, but this is easily rectified by saying "Pardon?" and personally, I'd take a few seconds delay over a dropped call. All streaming software will do this to some degree, and will use compression/streaming algorithms that are reasonably tolerant of dropped/missing packets. Computer games have used similiar algorithms for years to reduce the effects of network latency. I'm sure Skype is already doing this to some degree, it's just that the tolerance for this (or lack of it) results in regular dropped calls. Which are far more annoying than problems caused by poor sound quality.

[gato]

About these - I am no expert on VOIP telephony, but wouldn't a provider with plenty of users have more problems delivering data (think bandwidth) than a relatively new one? (Hmm, if this was true, maybe I should delete this thread again... )

Skype is partially peer-to-peer like eMule and can handle expansion better than a traditional centralized network.

This article has a pretty good explanation of it, though I haven't read the whole thing.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060713.html

The Skype is Falling:

Even Viral Networks Have to Function in a Real World

By Robert X. Cringely

Hey, it isn't supposed to work that way! Skype is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, right? And that means its capacity will expand to handle any number of users. No. Skype uses a technology called "Skype peer-to-peer," which has some definite server involvement and therefore finite scalability. In fact, the number of people who can use -- really, actively use -- Skype at any moment is probably back to that 10-15 percent, which in this case would be 10-15 percent of 6.1 million or a maximum of 900,000 users. That's a LOT less than the nearly 200 million registered Skype users and gives us a sense of what eBay got for its $2.6 billion.

[lokki]

All very good points that come up. But if you read further down in that article you see that the non-P2P aspects of Skype that would affect an ongoing call only apply to IP-addresses behind NAT-firewalls. OK maybe that applies to a large number of users but apparently if you have a "real" IP-address visible from anywhere on the net, then your skype sound will flow P2P and not be affected by the numer of existing skype-users.

And imron that was exactly my point. Quality will naturally degrade in areas with poor internet infrastructure but that would affect all voip solutions in approximately the same way. If one has better access points (better equipment or better placed in the network) that could give it an advantage over another.