London Calling

London Calling was Originally Posted on March 6, 2012 by lavarock

My friend Chucka nd his wife are heading to London to do some geneology research. Knowing that I have a wealth of knowledge (not all useful though), he wonderedif I knew a cheap calling card or other way he could call the U.S. from there.

As mentioned here before, I have an Obi110 unit that allows me to connect to the regular phone companies and two externalinternet phone services. One service I configured is Googles free telephone service. It allows me to make calls to the U.S. and Canada for free.

While talking to him on the phone, I added a quick configuration that if anyone calls into my system from service provider 2, ask them a passcode and allow them access to my Google Voice outbound calling. I then changed service provider 2 to be my existing U.K. inbound telephone number (also free). All he has to do is find a pay phone there in London, dial a local number which then rings in my box here in Hawaii, enter that code and dial a number somewhere in the U.S. and the only cost in any of this is the charge he pays to use a London Pay phone. If he was staying at someones house there, the whole process would be free to everyone involved.

So I proudly offered my solution and he mentioned that he would be traveling around to different areas of the U.K. and he didn’t mind paying whatever charge it would be to call my London number. I asked him for the cities they would be visiting and within 3 minutes had a local number in each of the 6 cities he expected to be in. All for free!

If I wanted to market a product to people in the U.K. I could have a telephone number there and be able to accept calls from there all for free (after buying the $50 box). It would also allow me to make my nationwide calls for free.

I also have an outbou8nd service that I use for international calls. Those calls are less than a penny a minute.

Isn’t technology great?