TruPhone extends Free Calls to 40 countries

If you ain't already out of a hangover, there is a good reason to be. Free Mobile VOIP call provider, TruPhone has given us a great new year gift by extending their free calls offer to 40 countries.

The biggest downside is Truphone works on symbian phones, primarily Nokia N and E series. They recently added Nokia E51, N81, N81 8GB, N82 and N95 8GB to their list. For a N/E series phone users, this is the "Must-Have" software on your phone.


TruPhone gives free calls to over 40 countries. I don't know if there is a time limit. Each of my calls lasted for over 20 minutes on average, but truphone didn't bother to cut my call. It just went on and on.

Besides the free calling, TruPhone offers Free SMS to other truphone users, provided both users are online on Truphone.

If you are using Fring, there is a good reason to use Truphone as well. I am coming to a conclusion that they compliment each other than compete. Fring is pure Mobile VOIP application developer and a leader in their market by far. They gotta be the most innovation Mobile VOIP app developers in the market but truphone definately scores when it comes to Mobile VOIP service provider.

Now since they extended the call, there is every reason to try it out. I have been extensively testing TruPhone since last 1 week. It works great for all those 40 countries. The voice quality is awesome, crystal clear without any drop calls. The only issue is it slows down my N 95 a bit. I need to figure out the issue yet. My primary guess is my firware which is like v 11. Too old, wonder what nokia asia engineers were doing when they sold this to me :-)

Truphone can be accessed via Wifi (Public, shared or WLAN) and 3G. There are a few tricks to minimise the battery usage while using truphone. I will write a seperate post on how to use Fring and truphone effectively so that you save valuable mobile resource while enjoying free calls.

I am off to make a few more new year wishes via truphone. If you haven't yet done it, just text 'tru' to +44 7624 000 000.

Yes, don't forget to wish everyone a very happy new year! 2007 was exceptional for VOIP Guide. I hope it continues to be good :-)

VOIP in India to grow faster

Gone were the days when VOIP in India was Rich man's dream. Now making calls over the Internet in India is easier than ever. The Indian ISP and broadband providers are all gearing up to enter the fast growing Indian VOIP market.

Over half-a-dozen companies including Sterlite Optical, Aksh Optifibre, Indus Online and Smart Broadband are in the race for providing internet telephony (VoIP) on the BSNL platform. It seems BSNL/MTNL will enter the Voice over Internet telephony market will full force. BSNL had invited expression of interest (EoI) for providing VoIP service earlier this month and had asked companies to submit their proposals by December 28.

Currently, MTNL is providing a SIP based VOIP service in Mumbai and Delhi. However since its limited to only 2 cities, rest of the indians ain't able to enjoy the benefit of VOIP. BSNL has wider coverage across india including the remote villages. BSNL's foray into VOIP will not only spread VOIP to masses it will converge India dramatically.

According to current market information, You need to be existing BSNL customer with Broaband connection or else you need to buy analog VOIP adapter. Tariffs for those who make PC-to-PC calls are likely to be as low as 10 paise per minute, while a call made from a PC to a landline or mobile abroad would cost a little over Re 1 per minute on account of the termination charges.

I wonder how fast BSNL can bring VOIP to rural India. Thats the key to success. Once the whole India is powered by VOIP. That will be red carpet for VOIP companies who are keen to explore the indian market.

We have already seen some great action from Indian telecom companies, mainly Tringme. There are host of other companies knocking the Indian shore.

Hopefully the VOIP scene in India will improve in 2008 and we all can talk for free :-)

Configuring SIP service on SIP Softphone Guide

We received many comments from users who are still confused about configuring SIP/VOIP services on SIP softphones. Today we discuss a Quick setup guide for setting up a SIP/VOIP service on your favorite SIP Softphone.

We are choosing X-lite (the most popular) SIP softphone for this exercise.

Before starting our installation guide we need to ensure that you have a working SIP account and our preferred SIP softphone.

If you have a SIP account and X-lite softphone ignore these points or else,

1) Get yourself a Free SIP account at FWD

2) Now Download X-lite

FWD (or any other SIP provider) will provide you with your SIP account details. Note them down.

Step 1: Start X-lite

Open X-lite, the screen should look like this.







Step 2: Go to Add SIP Accounts

Click the left button in the group of three at the top of the phone, and select SIP Account Settings, the first item at the top of the pop-up menu. You can access this via right click on main screen as well.

Click on the "Add" button in the SIP Settings dialogue box.


Step 3: Add SIP service

Fill in the "User Detail"

"Display Name" is name you'd like people to see when they recieve your call. Not necessarily your SIP account name. You can put any name of your choice.

"User Name" is your SIP service user name.

Put password of your SIP service in the password field, and use your username
again in the "Authorization User Name", as pictured below.

In the "Domain" field, use the IP address indicated in the image below, You can put SIP domain. for e.g fwd.pulver.com

After finishing, click "Apply" and then "OK" at the bottom. The Properties panel will disappear. Click "OK" on the "Account Setting" panel. The setup is complete.



Your softphone will automatically try to login to your account. If login is successful, you will notice that you are logged into your account and ready to make calls.

We hope this guide will help people setup TerraSIP account with X-lite. In future, we would write similar guides to setup VOIP Adapters or IP Phones with your favorite VOIP service.

Yahoo AOL now on Fring VOIP

This has to be the most exciting news this week besides a bunch of VOIP providers offering free voip calls over christmas and new year. Fring has dont it again and proved why they are regarded as "GODS" of Mobile VOIP.

Fring has now successfully integrated Yahoo Messenger and AOL instant messenger. This gotta be a great news. I can't imagine how much I missed talking to my fellas on Yahoo messenger while walking off the "Kallang River" :-) So now thats makes Fring a complete VOIP Messenger service with full SIP compatibility.

By the way, currently you can only send messages to Yahoo and AIM users. The voice calls are not yet enabled but I hope they would be enabled soon. Furthermore, Its currently only available for Symbian and UIQ handsets.

Besides that, Fring mobile VOIP brought WISPr for Symbian handsets. Now WISPR is also available for all UIQ handsets. With WISPr, fringsters can seamlessly roam within Wi-Fi networks, even in uncharted Wi-Fi territory! We discusses Fring Auto roaming facility a few days back.

Along with thses updates comes the support of a few extra handsets:fring welcomes Nokia N81, 82 and N95 8GB to the fring party.

If you already have Fring mobile VOIP on your phone go buzz some Yahoo friends or Get join the Fring party.

Cheap International Calls

Finally its year end. We blogged about multiple VOIP providers throughout the year and the search is still on for the cheapest VOIP provider who can offer cheap international calls. I guess, We found one finally.

Its by far the cheapest VOIP provider (comparing quality and reliablity). Thanks to Tringme.

I am sure most of you are aware of Tringme. Tringme is a VOIP startup from Bangalore, India and has been the news more than skype :-)

TringMe was in private beta for a long time and now they are officially open to public. Tringme also developed a great light weight Flash Phone application called TringPhone which works in a web browser. Its probably the most light weight flash phone in the market, its just 76 kb with core functionality is just about 3 kb, thats insanely low. No wonder the Tringphone client loads within fraction of second.

Lets see how you can use Tringme to make or receive cheap international calls


1) Push-N-Talk: Push and Talk is a web-based widget to receive calls from your party. You can get your free push-n-talk widget in your tringme account. Just copy-paste the code in any of the favorite social networking websites such as orkut, facebook etc, so people can call you.

Advantages: Stay anonymous and still receive calls.

2)Tring Me Google Talk Intergration: If you prefer to receive voicemails and phone calls on Gtalk, then select "Gtalk" option and specify the Gtalk ID where TringMe should reach you. Please note that you will need to add "tringme@gmail.com" as a your friend in Gtalk to receive calls and voicemails on Gtalk.

3) Tring Phone: You can use this light weigth SIP based VOIP application as pure SIP softphone or use it as a VOIP Phone.

a) TringPhone with external SIP account: You can set a external SIP provider in TringPhone and make calls using the provider. This way you can make free calls to certain countries if your SIP provider is allowing that feature and your tringme credits wont be charged.

b) You can use TringPhone to make cheap international calls to over 50+ countries at dirt cheap rates. You need to buy credits.


So Whats so great about Tringme?

Tringme is offering some great rates to some destinations especially India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. To give you an example:

India is about 5.6 cents per minute (However we asked TringMe to offer some special price for Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi, so the rates for these 3 cities are now only 5 cents). Pakistan is even cheaper at 3.54 cents/min and Bangladesh is about 4.08 cents per minute. Its not just India, but they have some great rates for other countries. You can check the rates from your account page.

I know some of you would argue that betamax is offering cheaper rate for international calls. Well, we all known the betamax story, if not read our post about 5 things you didn't know about betamax. They also offer connection charges and often change rates without notice.

betamax has zero customer service and has multiple billing issues. We believe TringMe can not only offer you good customer service but promptly provide quality service.

Is there anything special for being a VOIP Guide reader?

Yes, you bet. Being a reader of VOIP Guide, you would always be pampered with better and cheaper deals than what market gets. We negotiated a deal with Tringme, whereby anyone who buys credit will get 10% additional credit into their account within 2 days (in most case on the same day). Since this offer is exclusively available for our readers, Tringme will offer you this amount by manually adding 10% extra credit to your account.

Remember to use our links to sign up or top up credit in order to get this special offer.

Now you can call India from 5 cents per minute. I hope the effort that we took in negotiating the offers with TringMe will help you in making cheap international calls.

Finally, Merry Christmas to everyone. Go make calls to your loves ones with Tringme

Tpad launches Mobile VOIP

Tpad, a leader in internet telephony (VOIP) has now gone one step ahead by entering the mobile VOIP market. We posted some great free calling solution with Tpad and it seems they are now promoting the same solution as a official way to receive calls.

After successfully launching and running a VOIP service, Tpad is all set to enter the most dynamic mobile VOIP market to take on the veterans Fring and Truphone. Well, wait they are not providing any special mobile voip application but providing a SIP service which you can set up with your Wifi enabled mobile phone. As long as your phone supports wifi and has SIP capability, you can use Tpad.

If you have read our SIP Call Forwarding Tutorial, we discussed a way to forward your Tpad calls to Wifi connected mobile phone, at that time this option was never told to the consumers. VOIP Guide was the first blog to publish it online and visitors used it widely. Now Tpad is openly promoting the use of this solution, which is a great news.

Lets see how you can use TPad on your mobile.

1) Ask your friends and family to call Tpad Access number in their respective country and enter your Tpad number. The call will be forwarded to your mobile phone. Talk to them as much as you want. They only pay for local calls.

2) You can use Tpad account credit to make calls to your friends/family.
3) You can call your friend using Tpad. Just dial their Tpad number.

You might want to read their extensive guide to setup Tpad SIP on your mobile Phone.

Mobile VOIP in China

You heard that news about Skype being blocked by China? It still faces the issue and recently we received an email from Skype that china is still on their "Not Suitable for Business" list.

However In this difficult time, it seems the newer voice 2.0 startups are making their way into the dragon nation. Starting from today, China will get its first taste of mobile VoIP and . Thanks to Rebtel.

More than 18 million people live in Shanghai. And that doesn’t include the city’s 6 million migrant workers, making Shanghai one of the most populous cities in the world. Rebtel’s low-cost calls from Shanghai to the United States, for example, will cost just $0.018 per minute; $0.019 per minute from the U.S. to Shanghai. By comparison, AT&T charges $3.50 per minute to call a mobile phone in China from a mobile phone in the U.S.

Rebtel scores over other service for its unique model of providing services. It works without downloading any special VOIP application. It works on any mobile phone, it doesnt require you to use high end mobile phones. Its a callback system + VOIP technology combined to provide you a free service.

Of course, the native SIP client based VOIP applications and handphones are more powerful but for all those old handset users Rebtel can be a good choice.

Rebtel also offers a free trial of 10 mins call. Besides that, they are running a festive offer. If you buy a $10 credit, you would get $30 in your account.

So if you haven't yet tried Rebtel,it might be a good chance to blab around :-)

Call Skype with SIP and Asterisk PBX

SIP has given us tremendous flexibility in implementing and using VOIP. Of course second most killer app is Asterisk. If you team up Asterisk to SIP, it can do wonders. However It's still difficult for many SIP providers to terminate calls to Skype network via SIP.

The only two providers I can think of who managed to provide such service are Mobivox and Fring. Fring owns the market with its simplicity and flexibility of using SIP. My posts on "how to effectively use Fring to save cost" is long pending, hope I can get it on the blog before the new year.

Today, we look at one similar solution but its not mobile VOIP. We can use it for enterprise or small business usage. Its called Chanskype, award-winning Asterisk-to-Skype connectivity solution

Chanskype will enable you to make inbound and outbound calls via the Skype client on your Trixbox. You can receive or make Skype calls from/to other Skype unsers, make outbound calls to PSTN network via Skypeout.

ChanSkype Features Includes:

1) Call online Skype users.
2) Call using SkypeOut.
3) Receive up to 30 incoming Skype Calls ("Skype Trunk").
4) Bridge with SIP channels.
5) Make any number of simultaneous calls (limited only by system resources).

Chanskype is unfortunately not FREE, You can buy a personal version for $19 or Business version for US$ 99 per license for up to 30 licenses.

Those who are serious about using Skype for Enterprise usage or for their business can try this solution. They also have a Free Trial version to check how the software works.

TerraSIP offers Free Calls

As we said earlier, there are more free calling services making their way in the market. Today, we discuss about free calls to pakistan and free calls to bangalore. More and more VOIP providers are trying to push their products or services by giving free calls during this peak holidays season.

Terrasip is just doing that. TerraSIP as the name suggest is a purely SIP based VOIP provider. Its currently offering free calls to a massive list of destinations mainly landlines.

List of Free Calling destinations available on TerraSIP

Argentina Buen. Aires free
Argentina La Plata free
Australia Melbourne free
Australia Brisbane free
Austria Vienna free
Brazil Rio de Janeiro free
Canada Toronto free
Canada Alberta free
Canada Quebec free
Canada Quebec City free
Chile Santiago free
China Beijing free
China Shenzhen free
China Mobile free
Colombia Bogota free
Cyprus free
Czech Rep. Prague free
Denmark Copenhag. free
Estonia Talinn free
France Paris free
Germany free
Greece Athens free
Hungary Budapest free
India Bangalore free
Indonesia Jakarta free
Iraq Bagdad free
Ireland Dublin free
Israel Tel Aviv free
Italy free
Japan Tokyo free
Korea South Seoul free
Latvia Riga free
Malaysia Kuala Lum. free
Mexico Guadalajara free
Mexico Mexico City free
Netherlands Amsterd. free
New Zealand Auckl. free
Norway Oslo free
Pakistan Karachi free
Peru Lima free
Poland free
Portugal free
Romania Bucharest free
Russia Moscow free
Russia St Petersburg free
Slov. Rep. Bratislava free
Spain free
Sweden free
Switzerland free
Turkey Ankara free
United Kingdom free
USA New York free
Venezuela Caracas free

There is a small catch, you need to have atleast 1 cent in your account in order to make free calls. I guess that's really not too much to ask for isnt it?

I have tested Terrasip on X-lite and it works pretty good. You can register on their website and then they send you SIP details of your account.

The TerraSIP SIP details are:

Configuration and operation references (Sip server Settings):

Server Address: ...... terrasip.net
Port: ...... 5060
Domain Name: ...... terrasip.net
Voice Port: ...... 5060
Outbound Proxy IP: ...... terrasip.net
Outbound Proxy Port: ...... 5060
stunserver: ...... stun.terrasip.net:3478

Phone Number: ...... your Sip number (see your account in MyTerraSip)
CallerID: ...... your Sip number
Port: ...... 5060
User Name: ...... your Sip number
Password: ...... your SIP-Password .

Dialing advice:
Dial a number always without 00, but always with country area code, even if calling within your own country, for example for Germany, Frankfurt you dial 4969xxxxx, for Spain, Barcelona 3493xxxxxxx.
(Always the country area code without 00 and then the area code, also without leading 0).

If you didnt notice yet, You can call India (Bangalore) for free and also to Pakistan (Karachi). Of course you can call that huge list of countries for free. They have some insane deals, you can make free calls to iraq. I hope Bush uses this service for good :-)

So what you are waiting for? Go make your first free calls with Terrasip.

Free Calls on Christmas

Hold on to your seats, christmas and new year is approaching and its the best time of the year to get free call offers from VOIP Providers.

The first to annouce is of course the veteran Jajah who is giving away 1 hour of free calls on Christmas day to all Jajah Direct Users.



Jajah Direct is jajah's new service which lets you call via access numbers in several countries. . This promotion only applies to calls made using the JAJAH Direct product and not other JAJAH products. Each user will receive a credit for the value of the first 60 minutes up to a total value of $2.10 USD, which has to be used on Christmas day.

The biggest downside is the JAJAH Direct service is available in the US, UK, Germany, Austria, Israel and Italy only to call more than 120 global destinations.

Jajah's free calling promotion will start at calls made between December 24 (12 am GMT) through December 25 (12 am GMT). Although, there is no special mention about which countries you can call and which you can't, I assume you can call most of the countries, hopefully India and Pakistan as well :-)

Go get register at Jajah Direct.

VOIP Guide celebrates first birthday

WooT! What a journey. VOIP Guide has successfully completed 1 year of existence this week. We seriously hope you enjoyed reading our blog for a year and will continue to enjoy in future.

When I (Vinay) started this blog, I had no clue how to run VOIP Guide. I just kept on writing good VOIP articles and especially putting more emphasis on FREE VOIP. About 1 year back, there was seriously no one on the web following up on this fast growing market. I picked that topic and made it successful.



Today we get more traffic than professionally run VOIP publication services. Thanks to tremendous support by our readers. Without them it was surely a dream. I would specially like to thank Tom Keating, Andy Abramson, Om Malik (sorry om that voip bloggers competition never took off), Mirko of Cellomania& Pat Phelan for supporting the blog and educating me whenever possible.

Throughout the last year, I made many friends at various VOIP firms. To name a few, Jon@Fring, Yusuf@Tringme, Justin and Lungi of Yeigo, Steven Johns (Where are you these days?)of Tpad, Ruslan of Gtalk2voip and Guillaume of MySipSwitch. I might have missed a few names,I know I surely did, just can't recollect all.:-) Don't feel bad if you didn't make it to the list, you are still on my contacts.

On the contributors & readers front, My special thanks goes to Yogesh Chauhan, Ramesh Kumar, Alok Saboo (Contributor), Emoci (True VOIP Master), SatPhoneGuy (Another VOIP pro) and everyone else who have been religiously following VOIP Guide throught the journey.

During the last year, we wrote some great post. These voip articles are so popular that these individual articles have been read more than 600,000 times during 1 year.

To name a few:

1) Free Call to India: Our original smash-hit article which gave us instant popularity with over 400,000 pageviews.

2) Free International Calls: Second most read article on VOIP Guide with page views exceeding 300,000.

We also posted some of the most innovative and best voip hacks to make free unlimited calls. Our Jaduka hack was used by over estimated 8000 people. That was surely the best of the lot. We posted some great workarounds for AllfreeCalls and later Yak4ever. Unfortunately both projects aint working anymore due to various issues.

I am extremely overwhelmed by the success of VOIP Guide and would like to thanks everyone who helped me throught this journey in every possible way.

Without doubt, we will continue to give you the best and most latest news/articles on Free VOIP. Thanks again for making us the no.1 Free VOIP blog on the internet.

On a sidenote, we are actively looking for 1 more VOIP News Editor. Please send your applications to ut(dot)godmode@gmail.com

Free Calls to China and Hong Kong

As the christmas fever is building up, VOIP providers are snowing in more free call offers or rather extending them for the new year to get some more members on the board.

We have seen this across the board for almost all VOIP providers. The tempo is building now and around next week, we are expecting some big offers out for free calls. Last year we covered Jajah who were giving away full 1 day of free calls to many destinations including India. It was so much fun :-)

Mediaringtalk and Owtalk are both gearing up for the new year and have extended free call offers. Mediaringtalk will continue to offer free calls till Jan 2008 and Owtalk will offer free calls to hong kong till end of 2007.

Thats a great news for people who want to make free calls to singapore, hong kong, USA, Canada, Taiwan, Australia and United Kingdom. Owtalk only offers free calls to hong kong.

If you have a SIP Phone or VOIP Adapter, you might wanna try our recommended settings for Mediaringtalk SIP. We have tested mediringtalk to make calls to shanghai and it works great. You might see occassional SIP errors but besides that voice clarity is good. Although remember that each call is limited to 10 minutes, however you can dial the same number again.

We highly recommend to use Owtalk for making free calls to hong kong. Owtalk also a local hong kong number which could be handy to receive calls. Besides that Owtalk has a mobile voip software called Owtalk InternetVoice. Its worth checking out. If you have a SIP enabled mobile phone such as N95, you can download Owtalk InternetVoice and setup your Owtalk account in SIP details. You can then make free calls to singapore. However the easier way could be to just set it up using Fring.

We will be discussing some great ways to make free calls with Fring. How to effectively setup Fring SIP to route calls to multiple SIP networks without bothering about changing SIP details each time. Hopefully we finish that article soon.

Flash Phone Stops Free Call Service

Just when you thought the good days of Free VOIP are back? Flashphone has officially stopped their free calling service.

FlashPhone was never a free calling VOIP service provider. They are originally SIP based flash phone developers. They built and wanted to get some users test the system. I am confident that VOIP Guide has sent them massive traffic which prolly was enuff for testing :-) No seriously they are not a VOIP provider so it's not feasible for them to continue providing free calls especially to destinations such as India where even the wholesale termination rate ranges around 4-5 cents per minute.

FlashPhone team have posted an official note on their forums. Here it is for all of you.

"Dear users, flashphone isn’t a VoIP operator, flashphone is a web-based SIP softphone, free calls were needed for testing purposes. Everybody can use flashphone to call other flashphone’s users, to make and receive free SIP calls, to use your SIP provider for making calls to PSTN and receive calls. We are going to release CallMe widget soon which will allow you to put it on your site and receive your site user’s calls. You’ll be able to choose – receive calls in flashphone or using standard phone, mobile phone, PBX, call center via SIP.

Regards,
FlashphoneTeam"

So till it lasted, it was good. The party is over. We are waiting for the next big christmas free calling offer. Anyone?

Phone to phone cheap calls to India

We have some great visitors who keep contributing to VOIP Guide. We received another great workaround to make calls to India using Pennytel from outside of Australia, Singapore or Malaysia.

Disclaimer: We have not tested this hack/workaround.

This article sent in by RameshKumar from Bangkok. We also strongly suggest you read our original article on Pennytel to get background of the service before you try this workaround.

Register with Pennytel(Its a tedious process, becoz while trying to buy credits from them, they credit our credit card account with 2 smaller amounts. We have to enter these 2 amounts with Pennytel and then only we can start purchasing credits. So if we have access to our credit card statement online, we can get it done in about 3 to 4 days from the date of registration. Otherwise, if anyone have an australian ISP email address, we can use that address in our
account and ask the pennytel to send those 2 amounts to that australian email address. They will send it immediately)



Now, sign up with nonoh or any other provider who is offering free calls to Australia or Malaysia or Singapore. From most of the places calls to Landlines in Singapore is free of charge in nonoh

Sign up with them. Buy a credit for 10 Euros.

Now, go to pennytel. Login with out accounts details. And go to Call Forwarding option in the settings page.

Add the phone number in India to where we wish to place a call. Set the time frame as 30 or 40 seconds. (This is the time taken by the receiver to take the phone receiver while we dial them.)

set "Forward calls to this number" in pennytel.

Thatz it. Now go to nonoh and input ur number and the singapore number : +65 67226363(This is the access number provided by pennytel)

You will receive a call from nonoh and soon you will be connected with the singapore number of pennytel.

Now it will ask you to enter the phone number. Here you must enter your pennytel account number. Actually as we have set the pennytel account forwarded to India Landline number, it will automatically get connected to India number.

Talk as long as you wish. Itz just 28.8 Australian Cents per call.

Important Note:

* This hack is useful for the dial up users who can not use pennytel softphones to place a call to India using this 28.88 Australian cents per call promotion.

* And note that the price 28.88 AUS Cents is for India Landlines only.

Hope you enjoyed this workaround and thanks again to Rameshkumar for sharing this with VOIP Guide.

Pennytel offering cheap phone calls

There is reason to smile this christmas if you are looking for a great cheap phone calls. We have found a voip provider that would beat the cheapest rate you knew in the market.

Pennytel an austrlian VOIP provider with office in rest of Asia Pacific such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. This whole month of december and next month January, pennytel is running a promotion. They are offering calls to certain countries at 28.88 cents per call.

Did you read that carefully? Its per call not per minute, so if you make a 60 minutes call, you are going to make a great saving. We tried looking into something called "Fair Use Policy" but didnt find any fine print telling whats the upper limit. Sounds like a good deal unless we missed something.

Lets see where you can make cheap phone calls with this irrestible 28.88 cents per call deal.

Pennytel is offering this "Talk till you Drop" offer for following countries:

India, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, Iran, Laos, Macau, Malawi, Pakistan, Malaysia Mobile, Russia, taiwan, Vietnam, Australia Mobile.

All calls are only for landline unless otherwise states like Malaysia mobile and Australia mobile.

Now the biggest issue is will pennytel cut your calls after certain minutes? Is there a fair usage policy? To check that, I went to their live chat and spoke to Sean.

Sean@PennyTel: hi how can i help ?

vinny: hi sean

vinny: i want to know about talk till you drop offer

vinny: if i call india how much will i be charged? 28.88 cents per call?

Sean@PennyTel: you will be charged 28.88 cents per call

Sean@PennyTel: for both landline/ mobile

vinny: is there a limit for number of mins i can talk per call?

vinny: like u have a fair usage policy?

Sean@PennyTel: it is 28.8 cents per call

vinny: i understand that

Sean@PennyTel: it means you can talk as long as you want

vinny: all am asking is can i talk for 2 hrs per call?

vinny: is there a limit

vinny: ok thanks a lot. Just wanted to confirm if there is any limit for the call

Sean@PennyTel: please hold

Sean@PennyTel: ok the 288.8 cents per call is only applicable to india landline

Sean@PennyTel: 28.8 cents per call

vinny: not to mobile?

Sean@PennyTel: no

vinny: then how much do i pay for mobile?

vinny: ?

Sean@PennyTel: PennyTel Rate Card

vinny: ok thanks so this is only for landline then

vinny: or else its about 10 cents per min

Sean@PennyTel: yes it is

vinny: ok thanks mate

Sean@PennyTel: no worries

So it seems there is no upper cap for making calls.

You can use Pennytel Dialer to make calls. Pennytel also gives you a free extension number which can be reached via their access numbers in australia, singapore and malaysia. Pretty handy indeed.

Let us know your feedback about Pennytel and their cheap phone calls offer.

Enum directory - The next major push for VoIP

I had argued earlier that one of the major bottlenecks for widespread VoIP adoption is the dependence on the PSTN for completion of VoIP calls. Consider VoIP as another telephony option like cellular or satellite phones. One of the reasons why cell phones could became so popular was their independence from the PSTN networks, i.e. a call from one cell phone to another did not rely on the PSTN network for completion.

This is not the case with the VoIP telephony, at least not currently. But things are looking up and the future could be very different from what the situation is today. ENUM, a protocol that uses Internet DNS system to translate ordinary telephone numbers into IP addressing schemes, is slowly gaining momentum. Enum is to VoIP, what DNS is to internet. Enum facilitates completion of the call by locating the end points. You can visualize Enum as a telephone directory, with an address for every VoIP connection.

But for Enum to be efficient all the players should be a part of the directory. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Most of the major players like AT&T, iConnecthere are not part of the network, making the completion of the call difficult without routing through PSTN network.

UK has embarked on an ambitious project to integrate telephony networks across the country. The first phase will cover creating a directory for the internet telephony network. In the next phase this would be linked with the PSTN network. If this project succeeds then we might see similar implementations in other countries. But due to the lack of common regulator this implementation might be delayed as nobody can force a country to adopt ENUM. But there is always a potential for inter country partnership. Between Europe and US, we have the bulk of the VoIP market today. If these agree to partner on the ENUM directory, things would change overnight for the VoIP telephony.

This article is written by our VoIP news editor Alok R. Saboo. Alok is pursuing his PhD in Marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.

MessageNet offers more free voip incoming numbers

We posted about messagenet a few days back and their great offer on free voip incoming numbers.

Messagenet has now extended their services to London. Now you can get yourself a free incoming number in London in addition to free incoming number services in Italy. On top of that Messagenet is now offering its fax to email and VoIP services in U.K., France, Netherland, Ireland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.You may now have a Messagenet phone number in one of these countries to receive faxes by email or phone calls on your usual VoIP device.

FreeFAX is available (for free) with a London area code to let you get faxes in your mailbox.

Messagenet has also started some really cool offers for their customers including a World Flat Rate calling service. Over 40 countries can be called with this plan. It costs only euro 13.20 per month. You may like to check their Flat rate offer.

It seems messagenet is slowly becoming a leader in free incoming voip number services in Europe. We hope they cover more countries such as Germany etc. If we manage to get Germany on the list, the number might work with Peterzahlt and we could call the world for free :-)

Go get your favorite London number for your VOIP Phone.

Bok offers free usa and canada calls

Those who have been eagerly waiting to make free calls within USA and Canada can now relax :-) We found something (rather digged in our own existing post) that will let you make free calls to north america and canada.

Bok is a innovative callback free calling system which will let you make free calls to USA and Canada. The unfortunate thing, it will only work in USA and canada. However people in canada can call anyone in USA for free and vice versa.

Bok is actually a SMS callback system. You need to send a SMS with a number to BoK system and then it calls you back and connects your call.

Lets see how Bok works.

Step 1) Send Bok a text message containing the phone number of the person whom you’d like to talk to. Assume that you’d like to call your friend in Ottawa. Her phone number is 613-123-4567. Start a new text message and enter your friend's phone number as the content of the message.

Step 2) Now that you have completed composing your text message, send this message to bOK (613-614-0285). Hint: It's really convenient if you've stored the bOK number in your phonebook.

Step 3) Your phone will ring in about 10 seconds. When you pick up the phone, you will hear the phone ringing on the other end. Once your friend picks up, you will be connected to her and can start your conversation.

SEe Pictorial below:



Now talk as much as you want without worrying about phone bills or long distance calling rates. Of course, this is only beneficial if you have a good SMS and incoming free plan.

The only cost you would incurr is sending a SMS assuming you have free incoming calls from your mobile provider.

So those in USA and Canada start bugging your friends this Christmas.

We know some readers who have been actively looking for such solution. We hope this solution would make a difference to their life.

DialNow offers 1 cent calls to India

Betamax is eyeing the India market pretty seriously after some other VOIP proviers started offering cheap calls or free calls to India. Now their outfit, Dialnow offering the cheapest ever rate to India.

Dialnow is a part of ever growing list of Betamax voip service. Dialnow is currently offering superdeals to India and many other countries. You can make calls to India at 1 cent per minute.

Of course, there is a catch. there is no SIP, no software to use to make calls. You need to dial their access number which would recognise your phone CID and allow you to make calls.

Lets see how you can make calls with DialNow.

1) Register at Dialnow
2) Add credit to your account
3) Now dial Access number and make calls.

Remember that Access numbers for Dialnow are available in only few countries, namely Argentina, Austrlia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland & United Kingdom.

The most surprising thing is USA is not included in the Access numbers list. Sorry folks you missed this one unless they add USA numbers to the list, hopefully soon.

So all the guys from the above countries, Top up some $10 credit and try Dialnow at 1cent per minute to India (Landline + Mobile).

Let us know how it went.

5 things about Betamax VOIP you didn't know

We receive enormous comments for any post remotely related to Betamax and its VOIP services. Some of the post are targetted towards their voip minute billings issues or some with their voip service.

Today, we thought its about time we educate our readers about things you need to be cautious about while using Betamax.

We all know they had or still have issues with their systems. Most of the time, the account gets blocked or credit disappear etc. Lets see how we can possibly protect ourselves to the max if not the fullest.

1) Making Calls Via Betamax product such as Voipcheap, voipraider, lowratevoip, nonoh, 12voip etc:

You need to be extremely cautious while using your own VOIP hardware while making calls via their SIP services.

Users like Ramesh from Bankok emailed us saying " The published rate to make a call to India using voipraider is 3.5 cents. But I've made a call using ATA, and it deducts about 14 cents per minute. Afterwards I've made a phone-to-phone call using voipraider. Same 14 cent again. But an additional 5 cents per call for connection.
Finally I've made a call thro' softphone. Just 3.5 cents only getting deducted.

Now does that mean, if you call via their softphone its only 3.5 cents but if you use any other method like SIP Phone or VOIP Adapter, they will charge you more? Anyone else can confirm this?

2) Phone to Phone Calling Secret you possible didn't know:

Lets take an example you are in India and want to call USA. You are jumping with joy looking at USA as free destination. You buy some credit and thought of making a call. You are obsessed with your landline phone so you make a Phone to Phone call. Had a great chat. Now its time to check the account balance, oops you got furious? They possibly deducted some money from your account. You run to VOIP Guide screaming over betamax that they are cheating you. That was a typical story.

However, you missed the whole point. When you are using Phone to Phone calls always remember that when you receive a callback from their service, it costs them some money. India is not a free country, so if you use phone to phone, the call you receive in India is charged. Hope that makes it clear for some who thought they lost their money.

3) Most Common Registration 32 error:

We suggest you try disabling your firewall or antivirus software which might be blocking certain ports. Besides that, another common pattern is if you have used their service in the past, the registry entries are created in your windows registry. Flush them out and try registering again. The registry hack is not recommended for the weak hearted means newbies :-)This can crash your PC, am serious.

4) Improving Voice Quality: While making calls, shut down all other resource hungry bandwidth eating apps in the background. Pause your downloads. The more bandwidth your voip service has the more clarity you should get. People often forget that your uploads matter than most than your downloads. You wouldn't know this unless you are a gamer :-)

5)Fraud VOIP Resellers: There are apparently some people claiming to be resellers of Betamax. I am not saying all are fraud but beware of them who imitate betamax products or for that matter any other voip service and claim to provide you a free service. I suggest extreme caution while buying from such resellers.

We hope that this quick betamax usage guide should help you in dealing with Betamax services and improve your overall experience.

If anyone has any more tips to share with our readers, please drop them under comments or send over email.

FlashPhone offering free worldwide calls

As the year 2007 ends, it seems we are up for some good news in FREE VOIP world. We also hope that more VOIP companies offer free calls during the year end and new year period just like Jajah did last year. Oh my, I still can't forget those 2 days :-)

Now lets keep that aside and wait for those offers. In the mean time, we got something hot for you to play with. Flash Phone, a russian VOIP service is offering totally free calls to most part of the world including India. However each call is limited to 5 minutes and you can only make 1 call per day.

FlashPhone is currently in beta however you can signup to the service and use it. As i said they offer free calls to india including other countries.

How to use Flash Phone?

Well its pretty easy and straight forward.

1) Signup at Flash Phone website
2) Verify activation email
3) Login into Flash Phone


P.S: You need Adobe Flash player since Flash phone works on Adobe flash. Its very similar to Gizmo Call. (See screenshot).

While making calls, remember to dial country code area code phone number for e.g: Russia, Moscow: 74951000000

Besides making free worldwide voip calls, flashphone is working towards receiving calls from outside. Flash Phone is purely based on SIP and you can make calls to other flash phone users for FREE just like any other SIP provider.

We lurked around their forums and found some good suggestion by members such as integrating Flash Phone with Fring or Truphone etc but apparently Flash Phone has a PDA version which you can use on your mobile phone.

Currently there is no way to buy credits neither they have disclosed any rates to call certain destinations. So there aint any catch. Just login and make your 5 minutes call.

Go make your first call at Flash Phone.

Note: VOIP Guide is not interested in releasing a hack for Flash Phone. We want them to run this service for good, hack might destroy their service completely and we would loose a good service.

Free Calls to Pakistan

VOIP Guide has always been a no.1 resource for finding Free calls to India or Free International calls or even Free VOIP. We not only found a place in google but also in your heart :-) However we never blogged about Free Calls to Pakistan.

Thankfully we got some great audience who not only read the blog but share great voip services, hacks and much more on a regular basis. Our regular reader, Aboo Hamid has sent in a tip that Lowratevoip(another betamax product) is offering free calls to pakistan (landline+ mobile) and free calls to Jordan.

Of course always remember one thing, with betamax you need to atleast top-up minimum credit in order to make free calls or continue to make free calls. Its definately a great news to pakistani friends who always have been on the lookout to make free calls. Now for a minimum credit purchase you can make free calls to pakistan.

With lowratevoip, Registered users get max 200 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days and per unique IP address. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). Do remember this fair use policy before buying credit.

One more important thing not necessarily related to lowratevoip, but I would like to share. With any betamax product, if you do not belong to a free calling country, don't use Phone to Phone for free destinations. If you use, the callback to your phone will be charged. There is no point in blaming betamax that they charged you since your origination country isnt free and it costs money to call you back.

All pakistani friends, go checkout Lowratevoip and make free calls to pakistan.