When my wife and I decided that we were going to be living over seas for a year or more, I knew I had to find a way to call home for almost nothing. I also wanted a way for them to call us without having to use a calling card. This led me to researching something known as VOIP or Voice Over Internet Protocol. This is simply described as using the internet to make your phone calls instead of using traditional phone lines. Also I didn’t want to buy another piece of hardware to lug around known as a VOIP phone, I wanted to use our laptops and a piece of software instead.

1) Download X-Lite
After some trial and error using different pieces of VOIP software I ended up deciding on X-lite as my program of choice.
X-Lite is stable, free, and available for Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux. So I would highly recommend it. But there are other software choices available, but I won’t list them here.

2) Choose a VOIP provider like voipcheap.com
I don’t have a whole lot of nice things to say about voipcheap other than they offer inexpensive VOIP service with free incoming calls. Also their international call rates are the cheapest I have seen. One thing to note is to make sure when you go to their website to sign up click on the MAC & LINUX USERS CLICK HERE link so that you aren’t forced to download their crappy VOIP software. The way voipcheap works is you Pay 10 Euros and you have a maximum of 300 free outgoing minutes during any given 7 day period for 3 months. Voipcheap calls this “Free Days” and the free outgoing only applies to some countries like the U.S. Please look over their calling rates for “Free Days” if you want to call somewhere other than the US. Once your 3 months of “FREE DAYS” is up then you are charged .01 Euro a minute to call to the U.S. But….you get free incoming calls, which brings us to the next part.

3) Sign up with IPKall for a FREE Incoming voip phone number (Washington State)
This is an awesome service, and the only one that is free as far as I know. The only drawback is that you can lose your number if you don’t receive an incoming phone call for 30 days. IPKall get’s a small amount of money for every phone call to an IPKall number, which is why they can offer this service for free. As of writing this IPKall offers free phone numbers in the following area codes: 253, 206, 360, and 425. It takes about 7 days to receive your phone number.

4) Sign up with Voxalot for FREE voicemail
Not much to say here, except Voxalot is a great free service.

All of this is kind of a pain in the butt to set up at first, and can be confusing for new VOIP users. I hope this helps some people make the transition from land line telephone to VOIP Telephony.