Long Distance Free - Internet telephony

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Nov, 2000 by Ronaleen R. Roha

* A good Internet service provider (ISP). Most services work with any ISP. But pay attention to the system requirements and help screens. For instance, if you use AOL and you're told you need AOL 5.0, get it or your call quality will suffer. Again, faster is better, so a cable modem or high-speed DSL line is a boon. If you have a fairly fast modem and Web pages still take a long time to load, your ISP may be too slow to give you good results with net phoning. Be aware that most services either won't work through corporate fire walls or require adjustments to the fire-wall settings.

Getting started

THE SERVICES listed in the box at right were easy to install and gave us the most consistent call quality. With each site, you register online and get a user ID and password. Then you download software (or, with Dialpad, a small Java-based number pad), which takes no more than a few minutes.

Once you are online and have launched the service, you make a call by clicking with the mouse on the onscreen number pad or by typing the numbers on the keyboard. It takes a few calls to learn how a service works on your computer. Because some services work better than others with certain computer systems and ISPs, try another if the first service doesn't work for you. You can find a long list of companies offering a smorgasbord of free net-phone services, from long distance and Internet call waiting to e-mail by phone, at www.pulver.com/fwd.> NET PHONES -- Service Review

Deltathree (www.deltathree.com) permits free calls to phones in the U.S. and Canada. Its services also include international calling at reduced rates, phone-to-phone Internet calling cards for a fee, and free fax, e-mail and voice mail.

Dialpad (www.dialpad.com) offers free calling to phones in the U.S. and will soon offer international calling for a fee, but has few other services.

MSN Messenger 3.0 (messenger .msn.com) provides free calls to phones in the U.S. and Canada, instant messaging and online file sharing. You need a free Hotmail or Microsoft Passport account (which you can apply for on the site). The service is supplied by Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com), which offers domestic and international calling for a fee from its own site.

PhoneFree (www.phonefree.com) permits free calls to phones in the U.S. It also offers such services as free video mail and video calls, file sharing, and voice mail.