Calling Into Your VoIP Phone for International Calls

by Andrew Wiggin⁽¹³⁾
http://www.onsip.com

All of us communicate in different ways. We each have our preferences, privacy requirements and cost limitations. Communications should in fact be one of the most customizable services in our lives, but it's not. At least telephone systems aren't. With services such as email and IM, we can do things like categorize incoming messages, set our status to busy and implement filters which either allow or disallow people on a given list. Somehow we don't expect the same of our telephone system and that can be difficult to understand. Wouldn't it be amazing if instead of calling someone and getting a busy signal we could just see whether they're available instantly the way we usually do when chatting over the Internet?

VoIP brings all these features to the regular telephone system and because of its inherent flexibility, it can be configured to do stuff which could never be done using a regular PSTN phone. By now everyone knows that VoIP can deliver amazingly cheap International calls. But there are people who'd like to have access to this service no matter where in the country they are. Sure, we can always connect to the VoIP servers using a wireless data plan, but you might not have such a plan in the first place. Hardly any carrier offers data plans without a voice plan to go with it and that can get expensive.

But depending on who's providing your VoIP connection, you can have access to a nifty feature which allows you to do away with the data plan entirely. Here's what you do. You configure your VoIP phone to recognize a call from your regular cell phone in such a way that it presents your phone with a ring tone. When you make the call to your VoIP phone from your mobile, you just dial in the International number you want to call and your VoIP phone will make the call and relay it back to you! You can now magically make use of your VoIP connection to place International calls throughout the world no matter where you are without a wireless data plan.

This is very much like the Google Voice service which does exactly the same thing. The only difference is that the VoIP service is hosted on Google's servers. It's easy to see how such a functionality would be impossible with a regular telephone. Those are not configurable in any meaningful way and in the end that's why it's going to lose out to VoIP.

Because communication should be customizable to reflect our personalities and budgets and that's what VoIP is really offering.

Andrew Wiggin is an expert consultant on getting an SIP account. He also specializes in reliable mobile VoIP.

Article submitted Thursday, September 15, 2011 & read 9 times.

Leave your comments through Web Slingas:

No comments yet.

0-0-0-0-1-ADSO

Most Recent