Lingo is part of a much larger phone company (Primus) and benefits from the use of their extensive infrastructure. (Primus has been losing money for years, though, so there is some uncertainty about their future, but they are much bigger than most of the other startups.) Voice quality is better than most, more like a traditional phone line than most. It's so good, even faxes can be sent an received. Calls to Italy usually sound great. They have a problem with 3-way calling that they have never bothered to rectify. That is, if the third party doesn't answer, it's impossible to drop that leg of the call, so the first two parties are forced to listen to never-ending ringback tone until hanging up. I really don't understand why they haven't made this a priority. Occasionally the modem they sent, a UT StarCom box which is big, bulky, and doesn't include a wall-mounting option, has to be rebooted to clear the line. Their website is decent, but the call log just shows the phone numbers of calls sent and received, not the caller ID or even the city/state, they way BroadVoice's vastly superior web site does. Recently they had a problem connecting landline calls to Italy, I invested 20 minutes opening a trouble ticket with a tech in the Philippines, and sure enough, they did fix it within a week (but they never got back to me as promised with the resolution.) Some time ago they stopped allowing international blind call transfers except on a case-by-case basis, so I guess they were getting ripped off by scammers. They send an email newsletter regularly, and they once sent a special email to advise their customers that they had changed the name of a calling plan. That would be admirable except that two months earlier they had raised their prices by 10% and never sent any kind of notice out about that. That's just business, I guess.
