Please note: I have no commercial affiliation with any product or service mentioned below, other than being a satisfied customer of some of them. Your mileage may vary.
When home exchangers stay at our place, we welcome them to make unlimited national long distance calls. It's worth it to us to pay a little more for a phone plan than includes long distance than to worry about recouping a dime here or a dollar there if they dare to use our phone. Most US phone companies offer unlimited calling plans these days specifically because they must compete with internet-based telephone services.
INTERNET BASED PHONE SERVICE
If you have internet access via a cable modem, DSL or other high-speed service, you can use the internet to make free phone calls. Companies such as Vonage.com offer unlimited calls to all land lines in the US, Canada, Puerto Rico and European countries like France, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK. Other countries like China, Sweden, Argentina, Mexico and others are just a penny per minute to call. Vonage includes all of this and every phone feature imaginable for $25 per month. And that's a flat $25, unlike my old phone company, which tacked on loads of taxes in addition to charging for voice mail, call waiting and so on.
Vonage and other internet-based phone services work by attaching a small box to your router and plugging your phone into that box. You can transfer your existing phone number to a Vonage line, or select a new number in any area code, not just an area code near your home. Most cable television companies offer internet phone service.
Drawbacks to internet phone service include possible problems with emergency numbers like 911 (they can't tell where your phone is located) and difficulty calling if the internet crashes. On the whole, I was delighted with Vonage during the years I was a customer, but I recently changed carriers because my cable company had a special package deal including a land line with unlimited long distance.
PORTABLE CALLING
You can use an internet-based phone company like Vonage to place calls when you are away on home exchange. You can even get a European phone number through Vonage. However, you must bring the Vonage phone adapter with you, and your swap host must have a broadband connection available to connect to the adapter. This is a bit cumbersome.
SKYPE
A more portable solution for free internet-based calls at your exchangers' home is one that works through the internet, not by connecting a device to your router. Many readers of this blog have written recently to say they use Skype when on home exchange. This popular site (Skype.com) allows members to call each other for free. You can call landlines or non-members for prices similar to Vonage, or about 2 cents per minute to most countries.
As with Vonage, you can buy an adapter to let you plug a regular phone into your router. You can also buy an "internet phone" for about $200 including shipping which can use any wireless internet connection to place Skype calls. It's like a cell phone but it can only be used where a wireless signal is present. Skype credit to pay for calls can be purchased in increments of $10.
If you don't have the router box or the pricey internet phone, you can still place Skype calls, but you must do it via a headset plugged directly into your computer or laptop. You are tethered to your computer while talking.
BETTER THAN SKYPE
Skype has the name recognition, but there's a much better internet-based calling service available. Called Jajah, it has all the benefits of Skype with a couple of huge differences: first, instead of dialing the number your want to reach from your computer then talking into your computer headset, you use your own phone to chat without a router box or special $200 phone. The way this works is you pick which phone you want to speak on, cell phone or land line, and Jajah rings that phone in your home (or that of your swap partner). When you pick up, it connects you to your party and you speak normally on your phone.
MORE PORTABLE THAN SKYPE
The feature of Jajah that really blows Skype out of the water is Jajah mobile. You can use your mobile phone with internet connection to call anywhere in the world for around 3 cents per minute. Jajah mobile works with Blackberry, Treo, iPAQ, smart phones by Motorola, Nokia, SonyEricsson, Samsung and others. If I tried to call England on my Blackberry, my mobile carrier would charge me two dollars per minute. By connecting to Jajah I speak on the same phone for a few cents per minute.
Calls to other Jajah members are free and credit can be purchased in much smaller increments than with Skype, as little as $5 per purchase. In addition, your first 20 to 30 minutes of calls are free to any phone number worldwide.
Sorry if this sounds like a commercial for Jajah. I just think it's a great service and know that anyone who is comfortable with Skype will greatly prefer Jajah's convenience and features. By the way, it's spelled JaJah.com. Make sure not to enter the web address as JahJah,com, or you will find out more about Rastafarians than you ever needed to know. Sign up with Jajah and call me for free. My JaJah name is HomeExchanger. What's yours?
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