Are there companies similar to freephoneline.ca overseas?

[nauru]

Anyone know of companies like freephoneline.ca operating in the Netherlands, UK, France, Germany, USA, etc. which allow you to have a free regular landline with a physical phone using a PAP2T?

There are so many voip providers now, and most of them are not doing what freephoneline.ca is doing. Most of them want you to sit at your computer to make a call (skype), or buy proprietary equipment (magicjack), or do some weird shenanigans online each time you want to make an outgoing call from your physical analog phone (google voice). Freephoneline.ca is far superior to all of these because they make the experience of calling and receiving calls no different from a traditional $30 per month landline phone service with a big, old, telephone monopoly (except the cost, of course).

Is there any company abroad, in any country, which has a one-time fee for a config file, and then free local calls forever-after in that country with no monthly fees? Or is freephoneline.ca the only one worldwide?

Thanks.

[Jake]

The big problem with a company running like Fongo abroad is the way the phone systems work everywhere else in the world (as far as I know). Apart from the US and Canada you have to pay for your outgoing call, local or long distance. So a company offering free lifetime calls for just a one time fee, or even no fee by using a softphone, would probably go bankrupt pretty quick. As best they would probably never grow.

There are companies that will give you free incoming DIDs (phone numbers) and lots of companies that will offer cheap/limited free out going calls. Other companies will offer you a DID for free or a monthly fee, and offer you cheap calls. You have to look around for the best solution for you. Mainly I get calls from, and make calls to, my family back in the UK. I tried a few places before I set myself up with a couple of companies for my incoming DID, and one for my outgoing calls. In order for all this to work with me being able to just pick up my home phone and answer the call, or make the call, I set up a PBX here (well several over the years) and now it works seamlessly with me just being able to dial my family as if I was over there. Many PBX systems now will integrate gTalk/Google Voice pretty easily, so completely free calls to the US and Canada is not that hard.

I currently use Elastix as my PBX
My UK DIDs are from coms.com (although now I don't know if they are still offering free numbers) and UKDDI (3c.co.uk)
My outgoing calls are routed via voipcheap.com They offer 90 days of free calls to a lot of places when you add money to your account, then pretty cheap calls after which gets deducted from the money you put in. To me it's a good deal and much better than the calling cards I used to use.

Other companies you might want to look at for free DIDs are
neophone.hu (Hungary)
IPKall (US - requires a sip account to be forwarded to)
Callcentric (I have an free iNum with them. I also got a free DID with them, but you have to keep using the number of you will loose it)
I have also used euteliavoip.com who now seem to be someone else, and used to have an English version of their site.

If you are hoping to just set up accounts and make free calls everywhere, I don't think it is going to happen. If you do manage it, PLEASE let me know , but if you are willing to put in a bit of work then it is possible to set up something that will suit your needs more. It will probably mean setting up a PBX or using an online PBX system, which for me I enjoy. You could I guess set up different ATAs with different details, but that will mean having a lot of phones or messing around plugging the phone in different ATAs. For me I just wanted to use one phone system.

As this is a Fongo sponsored paid forum I would also like to point out that Fongo does have an international call voucher system which is a very easy add on to any paid or non paid Fongo/Dell Voice/ Freephoneline account. If you are looking for a non messy way to call people abroad, this might be your easiest choice.

[dibsmft]

In my experience, most people just want a phone service that they can just pluck into and it works. Of course this kind of convenience is going to cost you some money and that would cost me about $40 inc tax per month including local calls but lots more for long distance per from my local phone company. I no longer have a land line phone from my local phone company and cannot use FPL/DellVoice very much as they do not offer local DIDs here and the local free call coverage is quite small so I use two other providers to give me a local number and most of my outgoing calls using SIP and costing me about $3.50/month on average including calls.
Canada has some of the lowest wholesale rates for connecting internet calls in the world and relatively low termination fees but FPL/DellVoice must find it fairly difficult to be profitable for the level of service that they offer. In Netherlands, UK, France, Germany the termination charges tend to be much higher and, and as a result, wholesale call rates are a bit higher making a service like FPL less easy to operate. In the UK there are some "free call" services that use "premium numbers" like those starting with 870, 844 etc that pay money to the number owner for each call who then provides a "free" phone call to somewhere else. I know of no provider that give a service similar to FPL/DellVoice although some have tried.
If you don't mind using your computer to make calls then you can call others on the internet using SIP to SIP calls and while great from calling friends on a regular basis and for free for long calls this is far from a regular phone service.

[nauru]

Thanks for those responses. Actually the reason I'm asking is that I move around a lot and when I'm in different European countries I'd love to have a local phone that I can use to make free calls to local Netherlands, local UK, etc. I hadn't really considered having a phone line for every country in the world, although that would be pretty rad . Interesting that you say Canada has among the lowest termination rates. I thought it was a rule that everything in Canada is more expensive than elsewhere! I suppose that is one big exception then.

[Jake]

Well one thing to keep an eye on is an iNum number. It is basically supposed to be an international local number that anyone can call for free, or a local call rate. Some European companies are routing calls now (http://www.inum.net/?page_id=22) but there is obviously LOTS missing. You can dial local access numbers and then your iNum - but that is just messing around.

It is a SIP based system (which is why it is confusing that Fongo charges $12.08 per minute to call these numbers) so you either have to use a SIP device or a company that will route the call to a phone number.

iNums are generally free to get, I have mine through CallCentric http://www.callcentric.com/did_lookup.p ... b_did.y=18 and it can be called free through Google for example.

[dibsmft]

If your ATA device can us SIP addresses (perhaps in speed dials) then you can call iNUM like this
883510.........@inum.net or 883510.........@sipbroker.com (883510......... is the iNUM).