Fongo - a good Google Voice alternative in Canada

I had talked about this a LONG time ago, in my search for Google Voice workarounds I came across Dell Voice, powered by Fongo.  Well, it's known as just Fongo now.

It's a pretty good little app.  You can't argue with free calling across Canada, and unlimited texts... all for free.  For $25 extra you could even port in your own number.  There's a couple catches however, but nothing insurmountable:

  • only get 'local numbers' for specific cities, if you're not in one of those cities you have to go with a 'close enough' city, so then you wouldn't be 'local', but it'd still be good for dialing out.
  • you have to place calls through the app (unless you pay for the SIP info -- about $50 -- then you can integrate it with the dialer)

Their math has it at 0.5MB / minute.  So, that's a lot of minutes for even a minimal amount of data.  I had done the math previously once to figure out how much 'minutes' cost us on a voice plan, and it's definitely cheaper to get VOIP than Voice. (At the cheapest plan voice would be like 8c/minute, vs on VOIP it'd be like 5c/min)

Here's their release:
Hey there,
We're writing to let you know that Dell Voice powered by Fongo is now simply calledFongo. Don’t worry – it's the same great service as before, and all your purchased add-ons like World Credits and Visual Voicemail won’t be affected by the transition.
As the title sponsor for Fongo, Dell Canada helped us launch Canada’s free calling app to hundreds of thousands of smartphone users nationwide. This past year has been an exciting showcase for some of the great features and services coming from Fongo.
How does this affect our customers?
It doesn’t. All in-app functions will remain the same. And for easier and more convenient access, all online account management tasks will now be done within the app, as opposed to visiting www.dellvoice.ca.
We don’t want to give anything away but…
Stay tuned. Exciting updates and announcements are coming over the next couple of months from Fongo! We're hard at work on some big changes that will make Fongo even better, and we're sure you're going to love them.
Have a question, comment or concern? Send us your feedback at feedback@fongo.com.
Talk freely,

Comments

  1. I'm a Fongo customer all the way. Since day 1. I have three numbers with them. One from Dell Voice now Fongo and 2 with freephoneline.ca also owned by Fongo. I did buy the unlock keys for all three numbers. And by the way, you can't buy unlock keys from Fongo (Dell Voice) anymore so if you plan to go the SIP way, get your number from freephoneline.ca.

    The Fongo app is awesome and has the best looking UI I have seen in ages. Comparable to Falcon Pro kinda neat looking UI.

    As much as I like the UI on the app Fongo , I still use CSipSimple for handling the calls.

    And something nice to know is that Fongo when it was first released is that it was using 1 MB / minute instead of the actual 0.5 MB / minute so that's a huge advantage.

    At that rate, every minute used with my prepaid data on Koodo ends up costing me 3.5 cents :)

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  2. "You can't argue with free calling across Canada, and unlimited texts... all for free."

    I don't agree. Free isn't that important because every VoIP service is extremely cheap compared to my existing cell voice service - the issue is finding one that works reliably and has good sound quality.

    I can't comment on Fongo in particular, but when they push the 'free' part of their message too hard I start to wonder whether that priority might undermine other priorities.

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