International calling, cheap.
If you’re temporarily traveling to a foreign country and want to make calls out, I recommend getting a calling card (PennyTalk and NobleCom are both good sites) and using pay phones or whatever available landline you can find – the calling cards are super cheap, way cheaper than actually using a mobile phone to call out.
If you are in a foreign country (say, France), and have a mobile phone, people can call you direct through a cheap service such as Mobile Caller. But if you want people to be able to call you without incurring any charges on their side, here is what you do.
1. Get a Google voice number – currently only available by invitation to people in the US. You can get around the US requirement by using an IP address masker such as Anchor Free Hotspot. As for the invitations, request one, it shouldn’t take too long.
2. Sign up for Localphone. Localphone is a service that gives you a local phone number to call for each of your contacts in a foreign country. So if I were to use it normally, I would put in my location as France, and add my mom’s number, and it would give me a French number that connects me to mom. And that call is very cheap. The only catch is, I have to tell it where I will be calling from. So, I put in my location as France, give it a French landline number, and have to call the French number for mom from that landline – this is so they know who to charge.
For my friends to call me, I started out by using this service backwards. That is, I listed my location as Seattle, and added my own (French) mobile phone number as a “friend” I wanted to call. Localphone then gave me a Seattle number to call that rings my mobile. But I needed to put in each friend’s number that wanted to call me, so localphone would know to charge me. For example, I gave my mom the localphone number, and added her number to my list, and then she was able to call the localphone number and ring me. But this isn’t a great solution generally.
With Google voice, I can have just one number to give everyone, and I don’t need to individually add them. I list the Google voice number as my phone number, and my French mobile as the friend I want to call. Google voice routes to my localphone number, which rings my French mobile. And voilà, my friends can all call a Seattle number and my French mobile rings, and it costs me only $0.11/minute (which is very cheap by French mobile standards).
The really nice thing about Google voice, for those who travel regularly, is that you can change what number it rings. So you could set it up this way for when you’re traveling, but then have the Google voice number revert to ringing your US cell when you’re in the States. Which, come to think of it, is what I will do when I visit…