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4.6/5
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Recommended
City Wide Phone is a lesser known VoIP company out of New York, that caters primarily to consumers, but also offers a plan for businesses. The service is very aggressively priced as you will see from our review below.
The residential service starts at only $89 per year, which automatically includes an extra month so you ultimately pay less than $7 per month for phone service. This is for unlimited calling inside the U.S and Canada. A free cloned second line is also provided which can be useful if your daughter is on the phone and you need to make a call at the same time. An Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) is provided free of charge to residential customers, along with a softphone and a free Uniden cordless phone. One other standout on the residential side is that the price includes all taxes and regulatory fees - this is highly unusual and welcomed!
The feature set on the residential side consists of around 30 features. It is not as feature rich as some other providers you see on our website but certainly covers the needs of the majority. For example it comes with caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, call blocking and voicemail to email. One other standout feature is the ability to send SMS texts direct from your home phone and also to send a text when a voicemail comes in.
The business service portion of City Wide is fairly basic and appears to be very expensive at $39.99 per month ($15 for the first month). However keep in mind that this includes unlimited free extensions. Most providers charge a monthly fee per extension so this ends up being a very cost effective solution for businesses that have multiple extensions as a requirement. If you do not own IP phones, you can lease a Granstream GXP1405 IP phone from CityWide for only $5 per phone per month.
If you have never heard of City Wide before stumbling across the website, it is very possible to interpret their services in a negative light. The graphics and menus are very low resolution giving the appearance of a "fly-by-night" company. Though it is incredibly outdated, the information included in the site does adequately convey the extent of services offered.
If you need International calling, look elsewhere. Yes perhaps a little harsh but, as an example, for 500 International minutes per month it costs $70 per month. Words fail me here!
Number porting fees on the business side are expensive, considering the other services offered by the company are on the lower end of the VoIP pricing spectrum. To port a business number, you will pay $15 to port the number and a $4.99 monthly fee for either your ported number or a new number. This is a classic hidden fee scenario that will perturb customers, most likely. On the residential side, number porting is completely free with no monthly fee.
Faxing services are available but are incoming only and must be routed to an email address. This is a classic eFax type service and relatively expensive at $5.99 per month for a service that is incoming only.
The City Wide Phone website is horrible and needs to be moved on from its amateur 1990 feel. The actual service is competitively priced and adds some standout features but we can't help wondering if people hang around long enough to read about the service. If you have a need for International calling, to say there are better options out there is putting it mildly.
On the business side, the pricing is actually reasonable when you consider that there is no additional fee for extensions. However, the number porting monthly fee seems crazy and out of step with the actual pricing for the phone service.
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