Any free VoIP internet-phone calling left ?

I'd like to know if there are any free Voice Over IP (VoIP) services left whatsoever. even if they're limited to USA-to-USA long distance calling.

I got broadband for the first time in early 2002, in Feb or March (I had DirecTV DSL) and soon after, I discovered Net2Phone -- which at the time, was offering totally free USA-to-USA calling from the internet to any phone, for 5 minutes at a time. later that year, they changed it to 2 min at a time (which made it very limiting), and shortly after that, all free service from Net2Phone was gone.

I also learned of DialPad during that time, but by the time I learned of DialPad, they were not offering anything free.

In retrospect it seems that I discovered free VoIP / internet-to-telephone calling, at the tail end of its existance. I completely missed out on DialPad's totally free long distance calling (I even heard that it used to be free world-wide calling, was that true?)

I have not looked around very hard the last year or so for any free services that might have popped up. there probably are none, but just maybe ?

Reply to
suburbperson
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I have skype and yes that is free for PC-to-PC calling, like many other (lower quality) services.

what I am after, is free PC to *TelePHONE* calling.

Reply to
suburbperson

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Reply to
Clark W. Griswold, Jr.

I'd be surprised if you could find anything. Sending calls to the phone network costs real money, and the dot.com free money bubble is long over.

There's plenty of services that will do outgoing calls pretty cheap, like 2 cpm. Skypeout is an obvious choice, although I've had voice quality problems with them.

If you plan to make a whole lot of calls, one of the flat rate plans from a VoIP carrier like Broadvoice or Packet8 would probably be your best bet.

R's, John

Reply to
John R. Levine

snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Vonage is about the closestthat's what I'm using now as a landline.

Reply to
Just Plain Insane

Well, since telephone companies charge just over a penny a minute for accepting calls from other telephone companies (including internet ones), you are unlikely to find a free service that stays free very long.

Reply to
Clark W. Griswold, Jr.

I can imagine there might still be a few (privately supported) gateways that let you get out into a particular area code/zone, but I seriously doubt there will be a service that lets you get out anywhere you want.

Well, with telecommunications industry trying to re-invent itself as a PROFITABLE line of business, you might expect any FREE service to shut down rather than pop-up I would suggest that you get one of those $9.99 plans that most every VoIP provider sells and then upgrade if you chronically go over your 300 minutes.

Reply to
Dmitri(Cabling-Design.com

Are there any Skype-ish services that offer DTMF out? We have people try and call us, but they then can not get intact DTMF tones to our PBX to reach anyone.

Reply to
David Lesher

The few voip services I tried all allowed DTMF out, but it often took a bit of playing around to see which of the inband/as-rtp/as-sip methods they allowed. Ideally, they'd accept all three but I've seen quite a few voip "service providers" that ran some pretty lame voip/pstn gatewaying software. In cases like that one is forced to generate the audio for the DTMF oneself and send it inband. Given what most codecs do to that signal one will probably have to select straight "ulaw" encoding so that the other side can get a good enough rendition of the signal to decode the DTMF.

Might that be your customer's problem, that they are sending DTMF inband, but selecting some fairly aggressive codec?

If you have a few days to play, you might just want to set up your own voip gateway and allow folks to connect directly. A slowly growing set of universities are connecting their PBX to a small voip gateway and allowing incoming calls over voip.

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-wolfgang

Reply to
Wolfgang S. Rupprecht

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