Abhi Yerra

I got calls to be cheaper in the US and saved a bunch of money for my parents by switching them to Skype To Go for local calls. But what to do about calls to India?We have a lot of family in India who my parents tend to call often. Right now they use callingcards which are not the cheapest and have all these connection fees associated with them and Skype is pretty expensive in its calls to India costing nearly $0.09 a minute. So I wanted to find a solution to this problem with my newfound knowledge of VOIP technology.

I was thinking of setting up a VOIP switch with a cheap DID and routing calls through that to bridge calls to India except they would have to talk for about 2 hours before the actual calls would start to become cheaper. Initially this seemed like a good deal since 2 hours isn’t that much time. I was set to do this since it seemed like a great way to learn about VOIP and cut costs.

It consisted of creating a mini callingcard IVR. I setup FreeSwitch with a cheap DID number from Callcentric, and bridge the call with Gafachi (their rates are pretty cheap). This resulted in Costs = $2.95 + ~$0.024 x minutes per month. This was better than Costs = ~$0.05 x minutes.

However, this requires a lot of work on my part. I need to buy the minutes every so often, make sure the server is not on the fritz, and make sure my IVR works as intended. This is where opportunity cost becomes important. I can learn a bunch about VOIP and how those systems work, it’s pretty interesting, but at the end of the day I just need something that works and gives my parents cheap calls to India.

So I signed up for this service called IndiaMinutes which seems to be reselling Gafachi, it has a simple UI and a dial through number. This means I can just set it up and let my parents use it as they need. Plus, the Cost = ~$0.024 x minutes which means that it is already a couple dollars cheaper per month than my solution. Further, it has an ability to top up when funds run low so minimum supervision required. In general it seems to be a good cheap solution to call India. So I just setup their number in my parents Skype to Go speed dial to call India. We’ll see how they end up liking it and using it.