Rangatel

Availability: United States
Founded in: 2003

Rangatel is a business and residential VoIP service provider from Illinois. And as we would expect from a Midwestern company, Rangatel is forthright and fair.

Rangatel Business

Rangatel offers just a few varieties of business VoIP. But these are meaningful varieties:

• Business Basic
• Business Ultimate

Rangatel Business Basic

Business Basic from Rangatel gives you 500 minutes a month. Additional minutes cost 5 cents each. You can take unlimited inbound calls, though.

You also get some useful features – the only one you don't get with Business Basic is Outlook integration. But if you're going to integrate your phone system with Outlook, you'll probably want something more robust: Rangatel's Business Ultimate.

Rangatel Business Ultimate

Business Ultimate is pretty good, I have to say: unlimited calls to the United States and Canada, plus Outlook integration, plus three-way calling, plus find me/follow me, plus remote office capabilities, plus … you get the picture.

What I really like is that Rangatel has an exceedingly generous Fair Use limit: 10,000 minutes for your business lines. You're prohibited from the usual stuff that VoIP companies don't want you doing without their notice (or period): auto-dialing, continuous call forwarding, telemarketing, or fax abuses. But you’re probably not going to spend 4 work weeks on the phone, so you'll be okay.

Rangatel SIP Trunking

Rangatel also offers a SIP trunking service if you need that; however, when I visited the site on the day after Valentine's Day in 2011, I couldn't find any detailed information on Rangatel's SIP trunking.

Rangatel Residential

Rangatel's most intriguing offer is their residential VoIP service. And the most intriguing offer is:

Residential World Unlimited

$14.99 a month for the first 3 months. $24.99 afterward. No long-term contract. An easy – extremely easy – startup cost calculator.

And you get free calling to 32 countries, including mobile numbers in Canada, Hong Kong, India, PR, Singapore, Thailand, and the USA.

Rangatel does have a fair use limit for residential services; you can only talk for 3,000 minutes a month. But – and this is a big but – you can call internationally for free.

The startup calculator is pretty cool: you get an estimate (taxes can change daily) of your first month's cost, which includes the shipping for your adapter, your first month's price, and the additional cost of your taxes and fees (which are usually about $4).

Rangatel does have a few other options if you need VoIP to replace your home phone service: a residential unlimited service for the US and Canada and a 'basic' service that gives you 500 minutes a month. But the Residential World service is so good, we couldn't resist waxing poetical (and long about it).