I know many people, including myself, that say they just want their phone to be a phone and nothing more. They just want to make and receive phone calls. Wouldn't it be nice though to have this for free?
Let's be clear: To this date, which is Jan 17th 2010, you need to have some technical knowledge and some spare time to be able to have a free phone using the available services from different companies. We, at TELTUB, are sure that this will change either by us or somebody else and we will let you know once this happens. You can register for our free phone alert and we will let you know once a simple and easy-to-use free phone service is out there in the market that can replace your current phone.

Your email address:

Although it might be challenging for normal users to follow some geeky steps, we have a number of solutions for the people who have some technical knowledge and can find their way around complicated settings: (These solutions are intended for US users but you might be able to use them in other countries if you try)

• If you know what Asterisk is and are not scared to work with it, this solution is for you. You also need to have a free Google Voice account. Google Voice is by invitation only for now but if you know somebody who already has an account, you can ask him/her to send you an invitation. Up until a while ago, you could sign up for a SIP account with Gizmo5 and register that as a phone under your Google Voice account. However, Gizmo5 has suspended new user signup and Google Voice does not work with any other SIP providers.
  You should find a free SIP provider that gives you real US phone numbers. These are called DiD numbers and you can use them to receive phone calls. DiD providers forward the incoming calls to a SIP address that you provide which in this case would be your own Asterisk box. IPKall is a company that gives you free US DiDs but you can find other providers if you look for them on your favorite search engine (Aren't we all talking about Google when we say this?)
  I am assuming that you have an Asterisk box setup at home and you know how to handle static/dynamic IP addresses (using DynDNS). Once this is done, you can simply follow this instruction and get your free home phone line setup.
  


• If you don't have an Asterisk box but don't mind working with third party telephony providers with complex scripting capabilities, you could use this tutorial and setup your system. You would still need an IPKall account and a VOIP adapter.


• There are solutions similar to the video that is posted bellow which do not give you free phone but can decrease your costs. The reason is that these solutions actually need you to have a real phone line, like your cell phone, home phone, etc. You'd still need to pay for a phone line (maybe an affordable one) and therefore your phone will NOT be completely free.
  

There are a couple of other solutions which are far more complicated and provide lesser flexibility. Because of this very same reason they are out of the scope for this article.
These solutions are rather complicated and users might have difficulties to follow the required instructions. For those of us who are not tech savvy and looking to have a free phone service right out of the box, I suggest you register your email address and we will let you know once a simple free phone service becomes available. I assure you that this won't take too long ;)

Labels: Asterisk, Google voice, SIP

How can you have a free phone line?