Hints about the phone system.
The trouble with writing a blog about phones is that the information is rapidly outdated. I’ve used several systems for free calls in the past, but policy changes keep me on my toes.
Our French ISP, Free.fr, first offered us SIP through a Freebox in 2005. This provided free, unlimited calls to landlines worldwide using VoIP. It rapidly replaced our landline as our main house telephone. They also provided X-Lite compatibility, allowing calls to be placed from a computer or Pocket PC. Very useful, since those were the days of plentiful unlocked residential WiFi.
But all good things come to an end. The policy changed, meaning that X-Lite calls could only be made for free to French landlines. The hardware box can still call international landlines, however. So I built a hardware bridge to connect my Digital Picture Frame audio to the phone. This allowed me to trigger a dual-dial between a French landline (e.g. phone box) and an international number. But I had to run the server, which never got on well with my parents.
Jajah was the first to market with a similar system, allowing a 5-minute dual-dial between two landlines. Backsla.sh maintains a list of similar Betamax services, which I used frequently to make calls during my first year at university. I needed an international number for my room rather than an 0870, but found one.
In America, I had no landline. But IPKall offered me an incoming number, which would ring Gizmo5. I could then use the Betamax services for a dual-dial.
Since then, Google bought Gizmo5, and integrated them into Google Voice and GMail Chat. They now offer free calls to North America, provided that your IP address is in the States. I first used Hotspot Shield, but that is no longer working. My current solution involves VPNReactor to log into GMail and place calls.
The quality is atrocious, but it is now completely free to call the States. As for the rest of the world, I use iSip on my iPhone. I’ve bought some credit from Nonoh, a Betamax service provider, which offered me 2 months of Freedays, followed by very slowly expiring top-up credit.
The system’s good enough to call someone for essentials (are you there yet, did you get my email, etc), but not to talk for long. For now, Skype remains the best for arranged conversations. It works on the university proxy, unlike iChat, and my carrier (3 UK) offers it for free to prepaid phone users.
Dumbphones are still useful! When going to a concert, the risk of breaking your valuable iPhone is often just too high. Many of the features proposed in the original GSM standard are yet to be used to their full capacity.
So you think Push Email is new? I had an alternative back in 2006, before the iPhone was even released. Using a little program called SwissSMS and an AppleScript in Apple Mail, the first 160 characters of my emails were forwarded to my phone via text message.
In California, I stopped using it, since it costs to receive messages there. Note to American operators: stop charging people for messages they don’t want to get!
In 2009, I developed a newer version using all cloud-based apps. I set up a chain of GMail-RSS-FreeMyFeed-Dapper-Twitter-Twistory-Google Calendar-SMS, which would send me messages, but with a significant delay.
Since then, Facebook has added my carrier. All I need is a second account, using GMail forwarding to status updates via the photo upload email address. I then subscribe to the status updates via SMS, and my emails are appearing on my phone! No more 3G charges, it works like a free pager.
I can especially recommend its use with Google Voice, which transcribes voicemail to email, and forwards SMS to email. That way, people use my Google Voice number, I am guaranteed to get the message by SMS where-ever I am in the world.
Update, 7 March 2012
There’s actually another, even more elegant solution.
It turns out that some carriers allow some websites, even including email and Facebook chat, to be accessed without any charges when on 3G data roaming.
Contact me for details. I can arrange to get hold of a SIM card for you.
