Futurephone: calling globally for "free", okay, uses your minutes. Free to almost everywhere

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dr - 28 Oct 2006 18:48 GMT

I did a quick search, and didn't find a title containing futurephone. If
this is a dup, sorry.

Mac Pogue, an editor for NYTimes, discovered and wrote an article about
futurephone, and then had a blog for it as well. Basically free long
distance, after you place an initial call to Iowa.

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/09pogues-posts-4/

Seems you can call a number in the USA, and then dial a number anywhere in
the world for no additional charges.

"There's no contract, fees, taxes, signup, registration or calling cards;
you don't even give them your name or e-mail address. You just pick up the
phone-home phone, office phone, cellphone-and make a free call to Argentina,
Australia, China, England, France, Iceland, Israel, Mexico, Venezuela or any
of 40 other countries. Just might be something to look into if you want to
call internationally." Mac writes. Dr

(If this is old news, sorry, I've been away; and I have nothing to gain by
passing this on, not everyone gets Mac's newsletters)

Signature

dr.news //stores.ebay.com/better-price-wireless (not better than you
deserve, just more than you're used to) //free.better-price.biz (for new
lines of wireless service; all carriers; the phones are almost always a
better-price)

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verivin@yahoo.com - 30 Oct 2006 04:19 GMT

Has anyone successfully made a call using Futurephone?

http://futurephone.com/

You dial 712-858-8883, then 011, then the country code and number. If
the country is Canada, you just dial 011, 1, the area code, and the
number.

Every time I try it, I get a message that either 1) the area I called
isn't serviced or 2) the number can't go thru as dialed. I've tried
different numbers in different countries.

Any success stories?

> I did a quick search, and didn't find a title containing futurephone. If
> this is a dup, sorry.
[quoted text clipped - 23 lines]
> lines of wireless service; all carriers; the phones are almost always a
> better-price)

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Dennis Ferguson - 30 Oct 2006 22:54 GMT

> Has anyone successfully made a call using Futurephone?
>
[quoted text clipped - 9 lines]
>
> Any success stories?

For me it gets "number can't go through as dialed" messages when I
phone real phones, but for some reason will ring through to overseas
SkypeIn numbers from the same countries. I wonder where they get their
long-distance service from?

I think this blog post

http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/10/free_internatio.html

is plausible, that they're running an arbitrage scheme between
the low cost of long distance and the high call termination charges
that some small, rural phone companies still get (oh, and that
they're having the difficulty topping up their SkypeOut account
that Skype "customer service" has made famous).

Dennis Ferguson

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