DrayTEL Silver Tariff review

DrayTEL offers a unique calling plan, based on how much credit you pay for.

With £20 of credit, for example, you’re entitled to DrayTEL’s best Silver Tariff for 12 months, even if your credit level drops below £20. Other features, such as incoming numbers, voicemail and call forwarding are also restricted to paying customers, although it’s also feasible to use the service on a pay-as-you-go basis for outgoing calls only.

Call rates on the Silver Tariff are competitive, and DrayTEL is one of the cheapest services in each of our three scenarios; only no-frills VoipCheap is cheaper, and DrayTEL can’t beat BT’s standard package for cheap mobile calls. Unless you make lots of calls to a particular destination, a pay-as-you-go service is the best option, and with such low rates to international destinations, DrayTEL is great value.

Sadly, DrayTEL’s website looks as if it was last updated 10 years ago. Once past the home page, there aren’t any menus linking to other pages, and services aren’t neatly grouped or categorised. The user guide is a long, unorganised FAQ, which was unhelpful. There are guides for common VoIP hardware and software, but if your hardware isn’t on the list you’re stuck working things out for yourself.

While it’s cheap, DrayTEL’s service is basic and requires a lot of work to set up. The support isn’t much help, so you’ll need a good grasp of VoIP. The Silver Tariff beats VoipCheap because it offers an incoming number, but if you don’t call international numbers much, Sipgate is a lot easier to set up.