2. Plans & Features

BroadVoice says over half their subcriber base (10,000 at the end of 2004) uses BYOD and represents a "very wide range" of users. The two largest groups are: 1) users who have come from other service providers and want to use the same hardware and; 2) individual users who want to control their own devices or use hardware such as Asterisk-based PBXes.

BroadVoice has four plans (Figure 1), any of which are available as BYOD, plus a "Lite" plan available only to BYOD subscribers. All BYOD plans have a $9.95 Activation Fee that is $30 lower than the fee charged for non-BYOD plans, because Broadvoice isn't supplying hardware.

Plans range from a $9.95 Unlimited In-State plan suited for light users or folks looking to use VoIP as perhaps a second line, up to a $29.95 Unlimited Business plan with Terms of Service that allow business use of the service, i.e. higher calling volume.

Figure 1: BroadVoice Rate Plans
(click image to enlarge)

BroadVoice's feature set is similar to what you find with other VoIP services, with Figure 2 showing the high-level summary from BroadVoice's website.

Figure 2: BroadVoice Features
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Rather than go through more detailed descriptions of some of these features, I've included a series of screen shots from the user Account Portal pages.

Figure 3: Incoming Features (click image to enlarge)	Figure 4: Call Control Features (click image to enlarge)
Figure 5: Premium Features (click image to enlarge)	Figure 6: Messaging Features (click image to enlarge)
Figure 7: Outgoing Features (click image to enlarge)

While BroadVoice's feature set is competitive, area code availability is somewhat on the slim side. You'll probably be happy with the selection if you live in or near a large city, but I found I had only two area codes to choose from out of the seven available in my state, and prefix (or local exchange) selection was even slimmer. BroadVoice told me they're planning to expand area code / exchange selection, but couldn't provide a definite time frame.