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.

Being a product of the web/mobile/text messaging generation, landlines are a bit of a mystery. They are phones people have at their homes, people call from them, but why are these antiquated things still around? In the land of cell phones why are those things even used. I decided to take a look and decided to put it on a diet at home, an extreme diet actually though not a diet that will lead to death.

So my parents had this $60 a month plan with AT&T called All Distance (meaning as far as the borders of the US… I guess AT&T has a patriotic meaning for all, false advertising suit anyone? I’m looking at you pre-law friends of mine) which provided all the wonderful features one would expect on a modern day cell phone on a land phone. But the pricing scheme is off the fucking roof especially since it’s only $20 bucks lower than the cell phone bill. Also, looking at the bills for the last 6 months (at least they got the website right… when it’s up) I saw that they barely made 40 calls a month on the service.

I told my parents to go basic and get the cheapest plan possible since we usually only get incoming calls not really outgoing. This automagically cut the cost of our bill by $45 bucks! So I was looking around their site and saw the “features” I could add to the phone line and was struck by how expensive it was. $15 bucks for CallerID! Are you fucking kidding me? I can get a fucking SIP provider who will not only provide a DID number with all the bells and whistles that these bastards are charging ridiculous amounts for less than they are charging for a basic plan!

My research continued a bit further. So what was the state of our cell phone? We have AT&T Wireless (I love my iPhone) and realized we were not using all of our minutes (hell we have about 10,000 rollover minutes with like a 1000 expiring every month) so I told my parents to start using the cell phone more. Your probably thinking, “You told them what? Are you mad?” Yes, I know it was unusual advice. Yes, I know I could have just gone to the lower tier rate and cut a further $20, but with almost $45 saved on landline bills and with how much my mom has her cell phone with her anyways on my parents long drive to their second store it was a fair call… no pun intended. My voice usage oddly enough coincide with the evening and weekends when calls are free so I don’t have many minutes used during the day (ah… college). Since we have enough minutes to last a recession using the cell phone a bit more is not a problem.

So what about the landphone why even keep it then? It seems a bit useless if I told my parents to just use the cell phone a bit more. Well since we did have it and local calls are free and I started liking Skype (ykabhinav… call me) so I got the $30 a year unlimited US & Canada subscription and setup Skype to Go on the home phone. Since my parents are used to the nuances of Calling Cards anyways it is not much of a hassle for them to call Skype and bridge the call. I even set it up so that it just dials through Skype in the address book.

So what did we do with the savings? Well my dad spend $5 bucks more to get faster internet at home and I spend $10 bucks more to get unlimited family text messaging, after all my sister is growing up and she needs texting as much as I do. And I figured might as well teach the parents a bit about modern day convieniences where not everything requires a call… (Sent some info to my dad about BofA which he was asking about yesterday, he replied, “Ok.” My father’s first text message…).

Update: After using Skype for a couple more weeks my parents have gotten rid of all but the minimal service at their store thus saving them even more per year. If people were to do this at this rate it would seem that the landline business is pretty dire.