looking for a cheap voip/softphone

[Scott Goodgame]

You should really look into google voice, assuming you are in the us or canada. I use it on my laptop and bought a device called an obi100 for home. saves me around $30 a month for a home phone.

[zerubbabel]

Can't you use Diamondcard with Ekiga or Jitsi? Or am I misunderstanding the service they sell?

I use Jitsi in combination with a SIP account provided by localphone.com, and I am very pleased with it. I pay 99 cents per month for a phone number, with caller-id, forwarding, voice mail, etc., and the cost for outgoing phone calls is very inexpensive -- $.005/minute for the USA, $.007/minute for Germany, etc. You can also send SMS text messages via their web interface, but so far Jitsi doesn't have a mechanism for sending or receiving SMS, as far as I know.

Besides SIP, Jitsi also supports almost every messaging protocol there is, except Skype, as well as video and desktop sharing, so it really is the best open-source alternative to Skype, and is more secure than Skype. Recently they added the Opus codec, which provides the clearest calls I've ever enjoyed on a softphone.

(Opus is only supported in the nightly builds, however, but will be included in the next stable release, which is just around the corner. Having said that, I have found the nightly builds to be quite stable. That's all I use.)

Hope this is helpful.

[Scott Goodgame]

That service sounds nice. The Obi service is just using your google voice account so it is free. You can also use sip with Obi.

[zerubbabel]

That service sounds nice. The Obi service is just using your google voice account so it is free. You can also use sip with Obi.

Yes, I am aware of Google Voice, but I have avoided it because I am unwilling to have Google mine all my communications for advertizing tips (and heaven only knows what else). I don't know that they do this with audio communications, as they do with Gmail, but I'd be surprised if they didn't, since that's where their revenue comes from. I'd rather pay the small price for more secure connections.