Before it became common to communicate using mobile phones or the internet, a common source of friction between home exchangers was the telephone. A swapper would make calls at the exchange home and not know how much money to leave to reimburse the home owners. If s/he guessed wrong, or didn't realize that a particular call cost money to make, the swap partners could be stuck with a huge phone bill. Needless to say, many angry misunderstandings resulted.
COMMUNICATE ON THE WEB
These days, a lot of communication occurs over the internet. If your swap partners have high-speed web access you can communicate via email. There are also lots of options for using your computer to make phone calls via high-speed web access (more on this later).
NEW PHONE OPTIONS
These days, home exchangers can bring their own mobile phones on a swap and make their calls from their own accounts. Usually. When traveling internationally you may have a flashback to the bad old days. Your existing mobile phone may not work overseas unless it has the capability to receive multiple types of signals. Even if the cell phone provider claims you will be able to get calls overseas, you could arrive in a new country to find that your phone doesn't work after all. Since it is unlikely that your domestic provider has customer service overseas, you may not be able to fix this.
PHONE SOLUTIONS
There is a way to ensure you can make calls from overseas without inconveniencing your exchange partners, or worrying that you will come home to a stratospheric phone bill. As long as there is high-speed internet access at the swap home or in a nearby internet cafe' you can make calls via your laptop computer or your swap partners' computer. You can use a "Voice over Internet Provider" (VoIP) to make calls over the internet. You can do this by plugging a headset into your computer or by using a regular phone hooked up to an internet signal router.
We have a regular land line phone but we blocked international calls from being made on it. But our home exchange partners are welcome to make unlimited domestic or international calls from our VoIP phone. The VoIP phone is a regular cordless phone. It is connected to the Vonage router. It works exactly like the landline except it costs only $25 per month for unlimited calls to the US and the countries below. Included with the monthly fee are all of the features that a land-line company charges for: call waiting, email phone messages, caller ID, call forwarding and so on. I can also use it to make calls from my computer via a headset when I travel.
It is much more hospitable to provide free calls to your swap partners than to forbid them to use your home phone. If you want to give VoIP a call, send me an email using the link in my profile. I will send you a link entitling you to two free months of service. Try it, you'll like it!
Here are the countries to which your swap partners will be able to call for free. Other countries are also available for pennies per minute. An asterisk after the country's name means you can call both landlines and mobile phones for free:
Argentina
Australia
Austria
Bahamas*
Bahrain
Belgium
Brazil
Brunei*
Bulgaria
Canada*
Chile
China*
Colombia
Croatia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Denmark
Dominican Republic
Estonia
Finland
France
Georgia
Germany
Greece
Guadeloupe
Guam*
Hong Kong*
Hungary
Iceland
India*
Iraq
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan
Jordan
Kenya
Latvia
Luxembourg
Macedonia
Macau*
Malaysia*
Malta
Mexico
Monaco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Peru
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico*
Romania
Russia
Saipan*
San Marino*
Singapore*
Slovakia
Slovenia
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand*
Turkey
United Kingdom
United States*
U.S. Virgin Islands*
Venezuela
Zambia
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