Free VOIP Calls to Canada

ever wanted to call Canada for free but can't use icall or mediaringtalk or earthcaller? Then here is another solution to make free calls to canada.

Thanks to our Canadian visitors who shared this with us. Free Phone Line, a canada based VOIP provider is offering free calls across canada with a free incoming canadian number of your choice in 2 states.

In order to be eligible for this offer, you need to be in Canada. Oh don't get too worried yet, VOIP Guide is here for a rescue. Do they check if you are in canada? Yes, by looking at the state and ZIP Code. Just google any address in Toronto and register the number in your name. Of course change the address a bit so you don't bother someone else in future :-)

Lets see what FreePhoneline.ca offers their customers:

1) A FREE local phone number !: if you live in the 416, 647 and most 905 area codes you can receive phone calls on your new FREEPHONELNE personal phone number. (Many new area codes will be added in 4th quarter ’07). You will get a softphone from them. You can download the softphone. This seems like a geographic number so you would be able to receive calls from normal PSTN or mobile phones.

2)Unlimited Free Local calling ! which includes Unlimited FREE Canada wide long distance calling to these major cities : Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, London, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa, Quebec City, and Halifax, and, all the towns that are a local call to these cities!

3) Caller ID - The incoming caller’s phone number is displayed on the freephoneline softphone.

4) Full Enhanced Voicemail Service that is accessible from your phone no charge!
Voicemail to Email a copy of the voicemail is emailed to your private email account automatically , no charge !
5)Follow me service with enhanced unified messaging feature. When not at home, or if you use the PC phone and it is offline, you can set a number to call forward your local number.. You can also set the number of rings you would like the call forwarded for [example 3 rings to my cell phone] then if you are unavailable or you choose not to answer the call, freephoneline.ca voicemail will play your recorded greeting taking a message. This means you no longer need voicemail on your cell phone or other home phone lines, freephoneline.ca can be your central messaging service. This is very interesting, but I wonder if this can forwarded to international numbers :-) I couldn't test it today but if someone can test this out, please report your findings.

Overall seems like a good alternative way to reach your buddies in Canada and save on long distance and most importantly able to receive calls from everyone else in the world on your own canadian numbers.

I only wish they had SIP settings enabled on this service. That would be nice to flaunt my Canadian number on business card as I access the service on my Nokia N95 on Fring SIP settings.

Peer to Peer SIP VOIP network

While lurking around on the Internet trying to find that next big thing in VOIP. I stumbled on a to a great concept called "Peer to Peer SIP". This might not be very new concept and am sure people in VOIP industry must have already thought about it. It just sounds interesting that if SIP can be put on a peer to peer network, how efficient and easy the communication could be. Can this actually beat skype? We all know how skype gained popularity. The biggest advantage of using skype is it works even on low bandwidth network with the use of supernodes technology (primarily P2P).

Due to sharing bandwidth and resources over the skype network, users get awesome voice quality on skype. This is purely dependent on supernodes p2p technology which is often challenging when it comes to security. We wrote an article on how supernodes can be insecure on VOIP networks.

So coming back to SIP over P2P protocol, we found a website dedicated to this, its called P2PSIP.org, its like a open source initiative towards building a secure P2P SIP network. However its far more difficult than it sounds. We had a closer look at some of the white papers, Discussions and presentations on P2PSIP resource website.

What challenges this VOIP technolgy will face?

1) Security: Everyone know its far easy to crack a Peer to peer network. Its just like the open road. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for this initiative to securely route calls or any other traffic over SIP networks. I wouldn't be surprised to see if a identification method is implemented to authorise users and authenticate them before they send any traffic via this network.

2) Acceptance by Industry as Standard VOIP Protocol: This would be interesting to see how VOIP industry looks at this protocol. Its very important that industry accepts this protocol and start implementing it in real life solution rather than just sitting in the research labs as experimental VOIP protocol. Afterall open source is the way to go :-)

While researching further, I found an excellent Writeup by David A. Bryan and Bruce B. Lowekamp of College of William and Mary on SOSIMPLE-P2P SIP Communication System. This white paper should give an idea about whats in store for Peer to Peer based SIP VOIP services.

We strongly believe that p2p based SIP can change the way we look at VOIP today. It will not only bring more users to this ever evolving technology. It will actually make foray into more household via more open source & secure networks. We will keep a watch on the development of this new VOIP protocol and update whenever necessary.

Flashphone offering free calls to russia

They started with a bang and then dang, they stopped the free calling. We all missed the free 5 minutes of free call everyday. People dreamt all night how to hack this VOIP flashphone :-) so that they can make free calls for more than 5 minutes.

Well then the party was over. Flashphone being a VOIP application developer and not a VOIP provider, they had to eventually stop once they are done testing the product. Once you are featured on FREE VOIP Guide, you don't need to wait for weeks to finish testing, our active readers of over 15000 daily will do massive testing on your products within hours :-) I am seriously thinking to start a paid VOIP testing business. lol.

Alright, so now the good thing is Flashphone is back in business. They are still giving away free calls to limited destinations well its only limited to Russia (Moscow and Russia St.Petersburg). I suppose these are totally unlimited calls. So if you happen to have someone by chance in Moskwa (thats how they spell in russian) then why not give them a buzz? Russia is growing at massive speed so there are increasing number of people calling russia, we hope the free calls to russia offer last long.

Besides that, Flashphone can now be accessed via iGoogle Gadget. You can access the Gadget from here.

Flashphone team has also released a CallMe widget for Beta-testing, it will be available for every flashphone user with 1 line for free. Everyone can get now his own widget for tests, just need to write to info(at)flashphone.ru and provide them with flashphone login and direction for the call, direction can be:

- SIP URI, then widget will call to that SIP URI
- PSTN NUM, then your flashphone's SIP accounts which you have added will be used for termination of VoIP to PSTN
- Flashphone, then call will come to flashphone application. I understand you need to be online to receive calls.

Overall Flashphone is making a decent progress.