Looking for a voip solution

Early next year, my family and I are leaving the US for China and Taiwan for an as yet undetermined amount of time. One of the (innumerable) items to take care of is my phone service. Currently I have Vonage and I’ve been very happy with it. But I’d rather use a voip softphone only when we go abroad because that means one less thing to carry around. While Vonage does offer a softphone, it’s very limited and you still have to carry another account with a dedicated device (and their current wifi phone just doesn’t make the cut for me). So I’ve been looking for alternatives.

The choice basically came down to Broadvoice versus Skype and I recently just got a Broadvoice account. The main reasons I didn’t choose Skype include:

• I wanted to keep one of my existing numbers and you can’t transfer numbers to Skype (you can get a Skype-in number, but you can’t transfer an existing number)
• Skype’s proprietary p2p protocol makes me nervous

However, I’ve had a few technical difficulties with Broadvoice, such as incoming calls having no audio, that have had me questioning this decision. I’ve never had any trouble with Skype. I’m also astonished by the absolute dearth of good OS X softphones. For OS X the only decent one I’ve found is X-Lite and it’s nothing too fantastic. The current trend appears to be closed networks (like Skype) with network specific clients. So finding a SIP softphone client that works with any voip provider is rather difficult.

I’m going to see if I can get Broadvoice working, because I would really like to keep my old phone number, but a working Skype-in number is better than a broken established number, so I may switch to Skype after all.