Make Free International Phone Calls!

I found a fantastic free service provided by a clever group of folks in the United Kingdom. They will provide you with a UK phone number where you can receive inbound calls from the UK. You can also forward calls sent to that phone number to any international phone number. My brother is living in London, so I set up two numbers: one to forward to my cell phone and the other to forward to home. This way he can reach me on either line.

To get the UK inbound phone number, go to www.voipuser.org and sign up for a new account. Once you get logged in, click the My Numbers link and then request a new number. Then set it up to forward to whatever phone number you would like. For the outbound service, go to My SIP Account and request a new SIP account. Then just wait three days and you'll be able to use it.

You'll need to either have an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) to hook up a real phone, or use a software telephone on your PC, such as X-Lite. Go here to see how to configure X-Lite for voipuser.org. There was one trick I had to use to finally get it to work. I had to reset the configuration for the SIP account before entering all the info. To do that, launch the X-Lite menu, navigate to System Settings > SIP Proxy > (Select the proxy) > Reset > Confirm Reset.

Once you do that, just enter your voipuser.org username, your password, and sip.voipuser.org for the domain and proxy. It seems that there is some difference between the default settings and the settings from the reset. I'm not sure exactly what the reset does to fix the configuration problem, but it works.

Eventually I got it working and was actually able to call my house as well as Sheila's uncle in Colombia. Since it is a UK phone number, you have to dial 00 to get out of the country (out of the UK), rather than 011. So to make a call within the U.S., you dial 00-1-(555)-555-5555. Give it a shot, it works great!