Oldschool ViaTalk is less vexing to use than VoicePulse behind NAT. However the ‘new’ (secret) ViaTalk servers are painful to setup behind NAT — some NAT flavors more so than others. Once their old servers evaporate so will much of their patronage.
Of their almost cutting edge feature set call record (*99) is the most amusing. ”Your call may be recorded for quality control” is delightful to rave back at the automated attended that puts you on notice whenever you call into most customer server queues.. so that the people you’re calling will similarly be unable to revoke consent. Unfortunately it’s not very useful to have entire conversations archived on ViaTalk’s voicemail switch as it cannot be downloaded… easily. As most mail providers will choke on attachments greater than 20 megs.. as they should because email != FTP.. email is obviously not an optoin. There’s no sane reason not to offer WAV or FLAC downloads of voicemail, especially call recorded conversations, from the ViaTalk web control panel.
Of the dozen VSPs I have toyed with ViaTalk has the most appealing feature set and seemingly responsive support people. They, however, are oft on par with godaddy: barely read the message before firing back an irrelevant reply.
ViaTalk does have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) plan which is great for those who like to tinker — which will be ESSENTIAL to create a reliable service. Future Nine supports the BYOD model but VoicePulse does not. Be sure to bring a device that allows user set dial plans of you’re in for a world of even more hurt.
Viatalk though is merely SIP and *NOT* IAX(2).
Both VoicePulse and ViaTalk have implementations of call filtering (never let that annoying person ring your line again) but ViaTalk makes redirecting calls to other numbers much easier. VoicePulse only provides one number to forward to, which ViaTalk lets each rule forward to a number.
grab a free DDI (free DID) and make use of the second port
