Pfingo for IDD voice-over-ip calls

Welcome to the blog. My first post is about cheaper calls. Living in Singapore for many years now, my wife and I need to make lots of international calls to UK and India. A few years back we switched from using the standard telco lower rate IDD dialing numbers like 021, to a voice-over-ip provider called Sunpage providing a lower cost service.

Sunpage postpaid has been good: the call audio and connection quality have been fine, and we can use them here in Singapore from the home phone using 1521.., and also when travelling using the free X-Lite software and in mobile phones that support internet calling like my Nokia N95. One christmas we were travelling in the USA and were able to call to family and friends in Europe and India with Sunpage through a wireless lan hotspot using the same rates as at home in Singapore. The call rate back to Singapore from anywhere overseas is just 3 cents (SGD). No monthly subscription. Cool.

But the Sunpage service has one fundamental flaw: they charge peak and off-peak rates. So calling UK costs 12 cents in the day time and 5 cents in the night. Sorry Sunpage, but in the internet era that doesn't make any sense. So I started checking other services and found SkypeOut to be lower cost with no peak time call rates. Having tried SkypeOut before I still don't trust the connection quality and have never been able to get it to work using my trusty Nokia mobile phone. Then I stumbled across Pfingo http://www.pfingo.com/

Pfingo is a product from StarHub who provide fixed telephone, mobile, broadband internet and cable TV services here in Singapore, which inspires confidence. Also the call rates are lower: half the SkypeOut rate to India. Pfingo works on mobile phones too: their website has all the details. No monthly subscription. No time expiry of money you credited. So this last weekend we switched from using SunPage to Pfingo for our IDD calls. There's only one downside as there is no direct dial number in Singapore, like 1521.. for Sunpage, but you can trigger a callback using SMS to a Pfingo number. To use Pfingo at home I set up a VoIP telephone adapter which I'll describe in another post. Anyway so far so good: call audio quality and reliable connection and, most importantly, instant savings. Nice!

Update: 15/7/2009. Pfingo has been so far so good for calls. Occasional stuttery sound to UK but it recovers and does not disconnect. One local free call in UK (an 0845 number) has been billed at 0.30sgd per minute. SkypeOut for the same number is free, so I will use Skype for UK free 0845 numbers in future.