Spout Communications Reviews and Plans

Spout Communications was a 100% Canadian owned telecommunications provider. Their headquarters were in Edmonton, Alberta. The Spout focused on BYOD VoIP services.

Note: As of early 2017 The Spout was no longer in operation following a tragic incident involving his owner in late 2016. Many, if not all customers of The Spout, have migrated to providers like AcroVoice or CallCentric.

Please read below our 2016 review of the Spout. we will take a look at their plans and pricing and see how it compared with other residential VoIP providers.

Spout offered free technical support and had no membership fees. The spout allowed you to “bring your own device” or actually get one directly from them.

Spout provided free calls to other Spout customers, local number portability, unlimited SIP users and sub-accounts, premium quality incoming numbers whether regional, toll-free or international numbers. Other services include unlimited channels, full caller ID support, 311 service, 411 service, 711 service, and 911 service. Furthermore, free incoming fax-to-email service is provided, call forwarding, failover, and voicemail.

Spout actually offers some sterling long-distance rates, but one would never know by surfing their website. There are no advertisements on the site outside of “Save 70% on your phone bill, switch today.” Finding the actual rates was no easy task. Once you know how to do it, it becomes easier, but overall it is just a poorly designed website. As a VoIP website with no internet component, I guess we can give them a pass on the poor website design.

Having said that, we simply could not locate any monthly service costs. It might be there somewhere, but we simply cannot locate it. After clicking on the “service and rates” link, we then see a link for “Save a lot of money” which takes us to a pre-typed google search for “Case Study Cost Savings VOIP”? This is just ridiculous. We can’t imagine how many customers they lose from this poor design and we can only hope it is actually poor design and not intentional deception. Just let us know the pricing.

We can’t find any monthly fees so what about the long-distance rates? When we compare the international long distance rates with some of Gonevoip’s top residential VOIP companies, the Spout beats them quite thoroughly. This makes us even more frustrated. Let’s choose a few random countries for comparison. Yak offers long-distance rates to Afghanistan for 40.25¢, while the Spout comes in at 0.35271¢. Yak has a 6.9¢ cost per minute to Puerto Rico while the Spout has a 0.02233¢ per minute cost. The Netherlands comes in at 5.75¢ per minute through Yak while it is only 0.0234¢ with the Spout. These are all significant savings.

In the GoneVoIP review of the Spout, we had difficulty in finding the pricing and general information on their website. There is literally a link on their website titled “Service and Rates” which takes you to a page that doesn’t mention any rates, and you have to click on hidden links of the left. Then still, you need to find the link for a Google Sheets link which finally takes you to the promised land with all of the rates. We want to give them the benefit of the doubt and blame it on poor website design but even there social media pages list absolutely nothing.

Once we actually located the rates, they turned out to be pretty good. It is hard to fathom then why they were so difficult to locate or why the actual monthly cost for the service or any additional charges such as installation are also not listed. If we had to guess, we would blame poor design, which is a factor that often brings good companies down. The Spout had decent rates.

Features

Call Blocking
Conference Calling
BYOD:
Smartphone App:
Call Forwarding
Call Hold
Caller ID Name:
Enhanced VoiceMail:

Call Blocking
Conference Calling
Fax Capabilities
Fax to Email
Call Forwarding
Call Hold
Call Transfer
Music Hold
Caller ID Name:
Call Waiting:
Web Management:
Do Not Disturb:
Multiple Users:
Area Code Selection:
Extra Number:
Toll Free Numbers:
BYOD:
Desktop App:
Smartphone App:
Enhanced VoiceMail:
VoiceMail to Email:

- Hide