# Being an expat and able to call home



## hares (Dec 27, 2012)

As many of us expats living in this glorious land we sometimes are limited by the telecom oligopoly or forever condemned to use long distance calling phone cards... well someone time ago sent me a site gonevoip.ca It essentially provides you alternatives to the usual big telco found in the Canadian landscape. In many cases beign a lot cheaper. I switched earlier in the year and now we do not have to use phone cards anymore and talk to our folks in uruguay every other day (if we want to - not that we have to ) Anyhow - thought could be useful to others I'll get back to my reading newspapers now :ranger: cheers!


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## Freddy_uk (Feb 11, 2012)

I've not had a fixed phone line fir about 8 years and instead have used a SIP based voip solution. Many can provide you with a local geographical number for your province or provide an international number. I have a UK based number, once i emigrate i will keep that as a 2nd number so that when the family call me the call is included in their free minutes provided on their plan.


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## hares (Dec 27, 2012)

Hey Freddy,
Yes, we did looked at also having a local # in Uruguay but ultimately was quite expensive for us, something like $18 per month (use it or not) plus was still a long distance call for our folks as the only # we could get was in Montevideo (capital) - while more than half of Uruguay is there; there's still a lot of other people who is out.

Ultimately what we have works great as a fixed line in the home with many more features than a regular phone. Something we have found using is that you can make two outbound calls using the same phone # (different handsets though) may be unexpected but it has become handy when my wife is stuck in hrs long calls w/her folks/friends and I want to order a pizza or something  We switched to Phone Power, found a discount in the gonevoip.ca site which ultimatelly made something already affordable even more so :clap2:


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## hares (Dec 27, 2012)

Hey there Someone had asked me via PM to send the link to the site with the discount.. I accidentally (ops) deleted the private message... Anyhow the site it's mentioned in the posts but here you go cheers & happy new year!!


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## EVHB (Feb 11, 2008)

I always use skype for international calls. Most of my friends also have skype, because it's for free. So we can chat or call (video) each other for free. And even if they don't have skype, I call them on their landline in Europe, and it costs me less than 2 cents per minute (or for $5/month I can make unlimited calls).


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