VoIP When Overseas

Leave your (U.S.) cell phone at home and stick to VoIP and a local prepaid device when traveling overseas, suggests a Wall Street Journal blog post.

Users wishing to dodge outrageous roaming charges when traveling to foreign lands should first set up an account with a VoIP provider, such as Skype, Gizmo or TruPhone, along with a U.S. landline number. Take the landline number and give to those who need to reach you and leave it on your voicemail.

After arriving in foreign lands, either secure a cheap prepaid cellphone–easier to do on the ground than trying get one in advance over the Internet–or take your U.S. cell phone and pop in a local SIM card, assuming: 1) You have a GSM phone; and, 2) Your U.S. GSM provider gives you an unlocked phone (iPhone users may gnash their teeth at this point).

Once done, log onto your VoIP account and set it up to redirect calls to your new prepaid cell phone number. Costs should be cents per minute, rather than dollars, while State-side callers can reach you on a U.S. “local” number.

For more:
- Ditch your cellphone, use VoIP when going overseas, says WSJ

Related articles:
iPhone VoIP Options
TruPhone Buys SIM4travel

Bell Outlines Plan To Cap Wholesalers - Just in case regulators don’t allow them to throttle…

Bell Canada is worried that regulators might force them to stop throttling wholesaler competitors. As a backup plan, they’re cooking up a new policy that would instead bill wholesalers at both ends — charging for up front bandwidth as usual, and then charging them usage-based billing for user consumption. Fresh off of a conference with Bell, one employee for Canadian ISP Acanac states that 512Kbps wholesale service will now have a 2GB per month cap imposed on wholesalers, while 5Mbps service will have a 60GB cap.

Like Bell’s throttling push, bell claims the move is in order to prevent congestion due to P2P, but Bell has been unable to prove network congestion claims. Competitors believe the move is geared toward preventing them from offering a superior product than Bell’s throttled and capped Sympatico DSL service.
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Suggestions for Rebtel iPhone 3G Voip application
Hi,

You all must be knowing the latest buzz about the Apple 3G phone. With it being so cheap at 199$, I am sure it will revolutionize the mobile industry. Apple believe in innovation and with so much remarkable feature it will be the most popular gadget in the market. The iPhone 3G will be available on July 11th and so will the App Store.

Not only among mobile users, Apple 3G Iphone has created lot of excitement among voip provider. Rebtel, one of the leading voip provider is considering plans to launch its new Iphone voip application. The best part is Rebtel is asking people to give their suggestions about what kind of functionality you would like to see in a native Rebtel iPhone 3G app. This is indeed a great platform for people thinking of switching to Iphone and which are regular voip users.

Just to remind Free PC to Phone calls readers, Rebtel in collaboration with Free PC to Phone calls is giving free 60 minutes to India. Voucher code “freepctophone” has to be used at the time of registration. Rebtel keeps on providing with latest cool free calling offers.

As far as guidelines for VoIP applications on the iPhone go, Steve Jobs himself has stated that as long as the application doesn’t use the carriers network, VoIP on the iPhone is all good.

So, Its now time to give some suggestions about new Rebtel Iphone app. For more info, visit Rebtel blog.

Just to remind our blog readers about some of the free calling offer-:

1. Free Calls to India

1. Free one hour calls to India : Rebtel voucher code

2. Free 2.5$ credit by Tpad exclusive offers for our blog readers.

3. Cheap unlimited calls to Pakistan by Yupeephone.

If you like my blog, please subscribe to it or press Ctrl+D. This will enable you to keep yourself update with latest free offers. I will be postings such offers daily.
.

Who doesn’t like the iPhone?

By Carl Ford

As I walked the mall this weekend and saw the line at the Apple store to be the next iPhone convert, I began to wonder who is making money–other than Apple–on the iPhone?

The AT&T store was quiet, with a piece of paper saying that, despite the four-foot iPhone display in the window, they had no phones. The iPhone 3G has actually gained prominence within the store with a display and accessories kiosk, but nothing left to sell but the peripherals.

The rest of the displays featured the usual suspects: different Blackberrys, a Treo, a Samsung Blackjack.  AT&T’s Tilt and an LG Glide were the closest to the horizontal feel of the iPhone, but nothing in the presentations was designed to excite, just to compare.

At Sprint, its Samsung Instinct is trying to stand toe-to-toe with the iPhone and if you went on the web, you would think that it was competing with “Batman: Dark Knight ” as well.

Speaking of “Dark Knight,” Verizon has a Nokia “Dark Knight edition” camera phone. For its iPhone competitive strategy, Verizon has the LG Dare. While Verizon is putting all its cards in this basket, it’s a good phone as Noah from phonedog.com would tell you. But Verizon’s marketing for the LG Dare is off to the side.

Over at Alltel, Chad does not care about smart phones; the story is the magic of circles. Chad and the Verizon guy will be duking it out soon. If I were Chad, I would keep the wizard nearby.

Given all this, I would say there is a chasm that has yet to be crossed in mobility. As Fierce prepares for its 4G virtual event, I have to believe we need more.

As a recovering Bell Head, I like the Sprint/Samsung integration to the network operator, particularly to visual voice mail. While some say voice mail is dead, I think voice mail just needs to be annotated. Social networks are teaching us that the phone no longer has to be a real time experience and voice mail could be the binding between these worlds. 

While many are happy to join the iStore for Apple’s iPhone, I think it was telling that the AT&T salesman had downloaded a VoIP dual mode app but did not use it. I expect we are going to have that familiar problem of apps not being seen enough to be used. Competing for prominence on a phone suggests to me also that Google’s Android may be brilliant indeed.

Who should love the iPhone at the end of the day? I would say ad agencies. The fact that iPhone added 2 million more users to AT&T’s network is going to drive a lot of commercials. And it may be the prominence of apps on the phone is part of the advertising.

Carl Ford is Strategic Advisor and Community Developer for FierceMarkets. His words of wisdom can be found at www.carlford.net.

The NebuAD Fight Heads To Canada - CIPPIC urges regulators to investigate user-tracking tech

After Congress recently raised the question over whether NebuAD’s user-tracking ad technology violated federal wiretap and privacy laws, most of the company’s U.S. ISP partners suspended launch plans. Despite the promise of making more than $2 per user, per month off of selling your browsing data, the ISPs apparently felt they could lose much more via lawsuits. In Canada, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC, who’ve been active in the Bell throttling fight) are pushing regulators to also investigate NebuAD. From CIPPIC’s letter to regulators, which tackles behavioral advertising and deep packet inspection:

I really wouldn’t want to be NebuAD CEO Bob Dykes the last few months, given he’s watched his entire business model disintegrate. His best case scenario is that he releases the promised new opt-in system and lobbies Uncle Sam well enough to get them off NebuAD’s back, but that’s likely to take months. His worst case scenario is that Congress passes a law making this technology opt-in, which obviously decimates most of his projected revenue.
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Hi,

Pingo calling cards contest was a big hit. The results for second round are out. It was for those, who were left out in round 1 of the contest.

I would again like to thank all Free PC to Phone calls readers for taking part in the competition. And a special thank to Pingo business for sponsoring the contest.

I hope, winners will enjoy calling with Pingo calling cards. Off course, we would like winners to give their feedback on Pingo calling cards, voice quality etc.

So, the winners are -::

1. Srikanth ( I do not have your email address. So, please contact me at madhur[dot]dce[at]gmail.com)

2. Tarun Varshney

3. Rohit

4. Mayank Shah

5. Chaitali ( From round 1)

Congratulations to all the winners, I will mail them their calling card details within 12 hrs. Mail will be sent to the address they used while commenting or otherwise.

Friends, I will be coming with some cheap offers for calling India, Pakistan, UAE(Dubai) soon. So, do check back then.

If you like my blog, please subscribe to it or press Ctrl+D. This will enable you to keep yourself update with latest free offers. I will be postings such offers daily.

Frontier Imposes 5 GB Cap For DSL - Declares anything more ‘unreasonable’

User uid://1216713 writes in to note that Rochester, NY based DSL provider Frontier (see our user reviews) has decided to implement a 5 GB monthly cap for all of their residential DSL users. According to an updated acceptable use policy, Frontier now declares that any monthly usage above 5 GB (bi-directional) is an unreasonable amount of usage. That’s certainly going to be good news for regional competitor Time Warner Cable (who is cooking up some low caps of their own). From the Frontier website:

As with most companies who try to justify low caps, the carrier’s marketing department attempts to make the absurdly low cap sound reasonable by measuring the cap in terms of the amount of e-mails users can send (500,000), the number of web pages you can view (35,000 40,000), or the hours you can spend playing online games (350). Tip to marketing departments: this tactic doesn’t trick your customers into thinking you’re any less cheap. It does make them think you believe they’re incredibly stupid.
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WakeRupper : Free Telephone reminders and Wake up Calls
Hi,

Gone are the days when you have set alarms, maintain diary about important meetings, events. The internet and telecom era has moved too forward, now someone will call you up to remind about your important meetings, wake you up. The best part - Its free.

Wakerupper is an experimental service that aims to make telephone alerting free and as easy as possible. No more need to pay a wakeup call service up to 6 dollars to arrange a one-time wakeup call. But the sad part is its only for USA and Canadian numbers. Being in India, actually I am feeling it a bit jealous not able to test the service.

Wakerupper is quite a ideal service for people who have the tendency to forget important dates (Wedding anniversary), end up late in meetings. And even for those who don’t wake as easily.

Just enter the number of the phone you would like to be called on, the time you want to receive the call, your email address, and an optional 140-character reminder message and you will receive a call from Wakerupper at the time you have specified. Completely free of charge.

You can use Wakerupper to -:

Set a wake-up call at a specific time
Remind yourself of important events
Remember to take medication on time
Escape from a boring date or meeting
Remind child or spouse to do chores
Set reminders for tasks and follow-ups

You need not to register with Wakerupper in order to use it. But if you register with them, you get additional features like

1. Voice reminders - Record a message in your voice, for your reminder or wake up call.
2. Snooze
^3. Recurring calls

For more info, and to test the service visit Wakerupper.

Just to remind our readers, we have been running a contest - We are giving away Pingo calling cards worth 75$. Taking part is quite easy, and winning is lot more easy. So, do check the contest.

If you like my blog, please subscribe to it or press Ctrl+D. This will enable you to keep yourself update with latest free offers. I will be postings such offers daily.

Hi,

Vyke has always been one of the leaders in this voip industry. A month back Vyke changed the look of its website. They have always been running some nice offers and promotions. Latest one being a chance to Win Nokia N81 with 100$ Vyke credit.

Firstly Vyke is giving its new users 1$ test credit to make free calls. You just have to sign up with Vyke, and you will get 1$ credit to your account.

At the bottom on Vyke homepage, You can use your phone numbers as your username. Enter your Phone number, choose a password. They will send you a 4 digit verification code as a Sms. Enter that, and you are done. You will get 1$ credit to make free calls.

Vyke offers 3 ways to make calls using Vyke. One is Mobile VOIP, where you have to download mobile voip application to your phone. Second one being WebCallback, From your PC, you can initiate a callback with Web Callback. Tell them where you like to receive the call and the number you like to call and they will connect you. Last one being PC to Phone call, you can download their PC application and make calls to your destination. I personally favor PC to Phone calls.

Now about Vyke Competition and chance to win Nokia N81 and 100$ Vyke credit.

To celebrate the launch of their new-look website, they are giving you the chance to win a brand new Nokia N-81 8gb with built in WI-FI for using Mobile VoIP by Vyke! In addition, the phone will have all the cool Vyke products installed and a bonus of $100 USD of Vyke credit!

To ENTER, just call your friends and family with Vyke. For every call that is longer than one minute you will receive one free automatic entry into the draw to have the chance to win this great new phone.

* Draw closes June 15th 2008!
*Only calls that continue for 1:01 minutes or longer will be entered.

Check other details on the competition page.

So, go ahead and take part, you may prove out to be the lucky one. After all its free for you to take part in it.

Request to readers :: If you own a blog or a website, please link back to this blog. You may also write about this content or this blog in your website.

If you like my blog, please subscribe to it or press Ctrl+D. This will enable you to keep yourself update with latest free offers. I will be postings such offers daily.

Below are the links to other exclusive posts and offers for Making Free and Cheap to many countries.

1. Free one hour calls to India : Rebtel voucher code

2. Free 10$ calls by Pingo Calling cards : Fathers Day offer

3. Free 2.5$ credit by Tpad exclusive offers for our blog readers.

Skype, your favorite P2P VoIP application has released a new major version of Skype. The Skype 4.0 beta version offers a completely re-designed user interface with a full-screen Skype experience.

So you are still getting all the main features with this version as well.

• Free Skype-to-Skype calls.
• Free video calls.
• Free instant messaging.
• Call phones and cells, send SMS.
• System requirements
• PC running Windows 2000, XP or Vista. (Windows 2000 users require DirectX 9.0 for video calls).
• Internet connection (broadband is best, GPRS is not supported for voice calls, and results may vary on a satellite connection).
• Speakers and microphone – built-in or separate.
• To make video calls you’ll need a computer with at least a 1GHz processor, 256 MB RAM and of course a webcam.
• For High Quality Video calls you will need a high quality video webcam and software, a dual-core processor computer and a fast broadband connection (384 kbps).

You can download it here.