OT: Phone over the internet (VOIP) ?

[Gordon Henderson]

They're not closed services - they all offer out-dialling to the PSTN, most for free to various locations, if you keep a tenner (or 10 euros) in the account.

Scroll down to the bottom and look for the USA - most of the boxes are green/0 ...

Eg. Voipcheap.com will give you free calls without even paying them anything, but they cut you off after 5 minutes. (so you just re-dial) (or they did when I played with it some time back - made a half hour call to my brother in germany through it, re-dialling every 5 minutes!)

I wish I knew how they did it ...

Gordon

[Huge]

That's utterly useless to me.

[Dave Liquorice]

I don't think Skype gets anywhere near the 0.083p/min that the 5p for an hour on BT Option 1 works out at. OK that is variable depending on call length but for calls over about 4 mins long the BT way is cheaper...

[Adam Aglionby]

Try reading the bit that might be useful...

Most of the Betamax service require you to put in a tenner to have unlimited free calls, without the 5 minute bar, to the selected destinations.

There is a catch, they shuffle free destinations around them frequently, and you cant transfer balance between diffetrnt Betamax providers so can end up with balance on an account that hasnt got free calls to your wanted destination, even then call costs are low so if your a heavy user still end up better than landline charges.

Adam

[Huge]

Not to the USA it ain't. Which is all I use Skype for.

[Huge]

You know what, I've *already* spent more time on this than I give a damn about. I spend about GBP20/yr with Skype, and thats in the the noise. It works, which is all I care about. Why would I want to change? (This is a rhetorical question, so far as I am concerned, this correspondence is closed.)