International Call With 1 Dollar

Before making an Int’l call, don’t forget to compare your options:

Typical home phone or cell phone. Yeah. Normally this is the most preferable option. As we’re familiar with it.
Softphone. Not a typical for most people. But hey it’s just soft(ware) + (tele)phone. Our analog voice is converted to digital and sent over the Internet to the destination equipment where it converts our digitized voice to analog again.

Some of you might have tried Softphone but have you ever compare the charging rate from service provider? I found www.comparevoipproviderrates.com.

It provides easy comparing rate for us. For example, I can call a friend in Thailand just $0.014 a minute using the service provider future-nine. I can talk to her more than an hour and pay only 1$.

USB VOIP Phone Adapter, Support SIP, Skype

You can try either Softphone or an adapter like “USB VOIP Phone Adapter, Support SIP, Skype”. The product will make your life easier. Don’t need to install any software but plug the USB phone adapter to your PC/Laptop and make a call.

About Softphone

In computing, a softphone is a software program for making telephone calls over the Internet using a general purpose computer, rather than using dedicated hardware. Often a softphone is designed to behave like a traditional telephone, sometimes appearing as an image of a phone, with a display panel and buttons with which the user can interact. A softphone is usually used with a headset connected to the sound card of the PC, or with a USB phone. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Softphone Requirements

To make voice calls over Internet, you should have

* Any modern PC with a microphone and a speaker, or with a headset, or with USBphone.
* Reliable Internet connectivity like DSL, WiFi, cable or LAN. 28.8 dial-up modem may be enough if you use a codec compressing the speech to this bandwidth.
* Account with an Internet telephony service provider.

Comparison of VoIP software
Voice over IP (VoIP) software is used to conduct telephone-like voice conversations across IP based networks. For residential markets, VOIP phone service is often cheaper than traditional PSTN phone service and can remove geographic restrictions to telephone numbers (i.e. have a “New York” PSTN phone number in Tokyo).

For enterprise or business markets, VoIP enables the enterprise to manage a single network (the IP network) instead of separate voice and data networks, while enabling advanced and flexible capabilities to the end user.

Softphones are end user based clients for initiating and receiving voice and video communications over the IP network with the standard functionality of most “original” telephones and usually allow integration with IP Phones and USB Phones instead of utilizing a computer’s microphone and speakers (or headset). Most softphone clients run on the open SIP supporting various codecs. Skype runs on a closed proprietary network. “Chat” programs now also incorporate voice and video communications.

Other VoIP software applications include conferencing servers, intercom systems, virtual FXOs and adapted telephony software which concurrently support VoIP and PSTN like IVR systems, dial in dictation, on hold and call recording servers.