Saturday, February 5, 2011

More thoughts on Diamondcard SIP/VOIP, and phone service in general

I logged in to check my balance on Diamondcard today. Haven't looked at it in a while since I've been using Google Voice for my VOIP needs, since that solution is (currently) free rather than 1.6 cents/minute. So my balance sits on Diamondcard awaiting the moment Google pulls the free rug out from under us.

I was wandering through the Diamondcard site and re-read something I had seen before:

Diamondcard contributes, promotes and supports the following open source projects: Ekiga, Twinkle, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, OpenSIPS, WikiPBX, Podwiki, FreeRADIUS, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, Python, GNU arch. Our entire platform is built using these great tools.

Diamondcard funds Twinkle and Ekiga projects. The more calls you make with Ekiga and Twinkle softphones using Diamondcard, the more money donated to these projects. 10% of every recharge or online shop purchase is donated to these open source developers.


Diamondcard handles this kind of thing well. They put up detailed instructions how to use FOSS (like Ekiga and Twinkle) with their service, and donate back to the kinds of projects that they use or who send customers their way.

My current setup is that Voice rings both my TMO line (Android phone) and Ekiga on the desktop, set up to listen for Gizmo calls. Works fine.

4 comments:

  1. Yeah! Go Open Source!

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  2. I could never get Diamondcard to work with Ekiga. I spent many hours and many emails to Diamond and finally gave up. Even though I was never able to make even 1 call. They refused to refund my money. Not a business I wish to deal with.

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    1. I am, instead, quite satisfied with them.
      They don't spam, they reply support e-mail, their service has been quite reliable.
      The only problem I noticed is that apparently there is a difference when using usgw.ast.diamondcard.us (works great) and sip.diamondcard.us (remote can't understand me). I contacted them and they were surprised since the two addresses are supposed to go to the same server or so. It is my fault that I did not follow up to their request of traffic snapshots.
      And I really appreciate their support for open protocols, meaning I can use the software I like rather than the one they like, not limited to Ekiga (for example they also have good directions for Linphone).

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  3. Ekiga + Diamondcard has worked on every platform I've tried. I suppose it's not a perfect fit for everyone but I think it's a great fit for me.

    Thanks for your comment.

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