Computerworld

Woosh talks the right talk, and clearly, too

Dedicated channel gets rid of those nasty echoes and delays

Voice-over-may be hot right now, but it has a mixed reputation for quality. With this in mind, Toybox was interested to see how the latest modem and VoIP phone connection Woosh sent would work. It worked surprisingly well.

Woosh’s latest wireless broadband and VoIP offering also means that you can leave Telecom’s phone network behind — but only if you live in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch or Southland and are within Woosh’s coverage area. The service includes free local calls, for both residential customers and businesses; free regional calls between Woosh phone numbers; 10-cents-per-minute national calls to any landline number in New Zealand, and 45-cents-per-minute landline-to-mobile calls to any New Zealand mobile number.

Best of all, you can call 40 countries for 10 cents per minute, including the UK, the US, China, Ireland, Australia, Canada and, of course — most important to me — Sweden. Calling rates to cellphones abroad vary greatly. For example, it costs 79 cents per minute to call cellphones in Sweden; 49 cents per minute to cellphones in the UK, but only 10 cents per minute for calls to the US.

There are three different Woosh VoIP kits to choose from. First, there is the modem-and-phone connection kit, which I tried out. This should hook up to your existing phone. However, my relatively new, standard office phone did not want to co-operate in the experiment, and so another phone had to be brought in.

The second kit consists of a modem and software phone, which is useful if you want to use the phone services with your laptop or desktop computer. Third is the PC card-and-software-phone for people that are out and about. The software phone is not compatible with Macs.

Back to my phone experience. Once the new phone was plugged in, I tried calling cellphones and landlines in New Zealand and Sweden, and found the line quality very good. There were no delays and no echoes, mainly thanks to Woosh providing a dedicated VoIP channel that separates voice and data.

Woosh offers free call redirect for the first two months if switching from Telecom to Woosh. The package also comes with free voicemail, caller ID and number-withhold functions. Because I make a lot of international calls, I would consider changing to Woosh, if I lived within the coverage area.

If you have any gizmos, devices, gadgets or just cool stuff you would like Toybox to check out just send an email to toybox@computerworld.co.nz and we’ll send you our courier address.