SIP provider?

[dlots]

I am playing around with Asterisk and am to the point that I would like to get a SIP trunk. It looks like the prices are very different depending on who you go with, does anyone have a provider they really like?

[wintermute000]

ironically, for labbing, the worse the provider, the better your labbing

It doesn't really matter, and 90% of the cheap providers are all using some flavour of asterisk at the backend

[routerdork]

I can't find it in my favorites but either early on here or at the the old place we had a thread about this. There is a free place that allows you to place calls for testing for like 1-2 minutes. Other than that there are a lot of providers out there.

[Dieselboy]

I've been using SIP at home for a few years now. Here in Australia I use a UK provider to my home. Initially I had 3 SIP trunks, UK, Australia and USA, just for playing around really.

Callcentric was hassle-free and if I remember rightly they give you a DID for free. This is USA.

CCS Leeds is my UK SIP trunk that I have been using since I bought my 2901 in England back in 2011 I think. They're pretty good, but each month I have to pay them via a bank transfer which is a pain. They keep telling me they will get direct debit. I have missed a few payments because I've forgot and they've been okay about it. The following month they send the next bill and remind me I have outstanding charges so I pay the lot. Service never affected. I've not looked into it but they may just be reselling the SIP service. Since my SIP trunk goes to cloudcalling.co.uk. They have a nice web portal as well which is good. I make a few calls to family in England each month and the bill has never been higher than 10 pounds per month

Faktortel - This is the Australian ITSP we use here in the office and I also still have a trunk running to my home. I use their pay as you go system. I've not even logged into my account for years, but the service is still working as occasionally I get wrong numbers calling me. I think I put a few dollars credit on back in 2012. I probably still have some credit left on there. They're good guys on the support team as I've had a few problems in the office relating to authentication which we resolved once I understood how their Asterisk system was working / expecting things.

sip.us - this is our USA trunk. They are so cheap we route all our international calls out through them. Again, no real hassle. Web portal is okay. Support team is okay also.

None of the above charge for incoming calls.
CCS Leeds charge me 1 pound for the PSTN number, 1 pound for the SIP trunk, 1 pound for the extension (which I guess is my actual phone, not really sure, because this is managed by me at my CUCME anyway). There's VAT on top of that which is now 20% because they government are creaming it. So this works out a minimum charge each month of 3 pounds 60 pence. (no UK pound symbol on these keyboards). Call costs are 1p for the connection and 0.007p per minute for peak calls and 0.00375p per minute for off peak calls. Pretty cheap.

[dlots]

Thank you :-)