Problems With Voip Provider

[MATHA531]

I signed up with voicestick to take advantage of the call forwarding...prefer local sims to united mobile when wandering around especially in the UK where I don't want to have to walk around with 2 phones, one for receiving and the other for making calls conveniently.

Anyway, my landline call forwarding service with verizon and services such as Kall8 which I can set off my T Mobile US mobile charge around 30?/minute to call the UK (as opposed to 10?/minuate to Liechtenstein on the verizon landline call forwarding through Verizon landline via AT&T) so voicestick's 14?/minute call forwarding to UK mobiles seemed a good deal.

Got the voicestick number and started playing around with my O2 and virgin mobile UK sims to check it out.

First the good news...caller hears a message connecting your call which is very helpful as the callforwarding sometimes take too long and the caller hangs up thinking the number is not working or down or something like that.

Calls did go through and I thought everything was fine with the O2 mobile...then I checked online and for each of the test calls, which were of very short duration just to hear my voicemail message and leave a quick message...and I did this on 4 different occasons, I was charged for a 5 minute call....and when I checked the voicemail via a landline to see how clear the messages I left were, I was told I have a 4 minute message despite the fact I had left a 5 second message ("give me a call when you get a chance" and then hung up)....they were nice and refunded the money into my account so my complaint is not necessarily with them. But rather it now makes me leery to use this.

As far as virgin mobile UK, a new problem has occurred. Everytime I tried to call the virgin UK mobile I get one of two messages; either, "You have dialed an incorrect number, please check the number and dial again" or "We are unable to connect your call, please try again." Tried it 4 or 5 times using every combination of calling I have including kall8 call forwarding, direct dial on the landline and keep getting the same message......yet when I turn the phone on, it rings (I'm in the USA and won't let it ring through to voicemail from there as we all know Virgin charges astronomically high rates for roaming in the USA).

Can't figure out what's wrong with voicestick in the former and in the later, I e mailed the team at Virgin and they told me they had reset the diverts to voicemail and it was working on their end....can't figure out however why I can't complete a call from the US to my Virgin Mobile UK sim when the phone is off.

[andy]

It seems that maybe Voicestick is not recognising the hang-up signal from the phone. It's odd that it takes 5 minutes, as I was told by another provider that calls should clear from the other end by default a minute later; this was for callback though. You could instead try pressing ## which usually forces it, but not if dtmf tones are not recognised.

Maybe that individual Virgin prefix is not recognised by the provider Voicestick is using to forward the call. This seems to be a possibility sometimes when a new prefix group eg 07722 is enabled. If you've had yours for quite a while this ought to be pretty unlikely though.

Or you could use Voipfone (.co.uk) to forward the call to the UK SIM (O2 8.4p, Virgin about 12p), and get a US number from Freedigits or IPKall to point to the Voipfone SIP address. The free numbers don't have much of a range of area codes though; but maybe that doesn't matter too much for forwarding from your T-mobile. Voipfone also has a callback service which could help when you can't top-up the phone.

[Bossman]

I have also received thhose message a few times (regardless of calling card used) while calling my Virgin-Uk number from here. I just call right back and it usually goes through. Yes. on those occasions the phone was off.

BTW, you can let the phone ring through to VM if you want. You will not be charged a roaming fee because it rolled to VM (Like the US carriers do). I know that for a fact. I have received VM messages several times on my virgin sim with the phone being on and have never been charged for roaming because it rolled to VM. I even call the number from another phone (with the phone being on), let it roll to VM, then hit the # key to check my VM messages from here.