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Comment by adamonduty | Hacker News Reader

I'm working on PhoneCard, a service to make cheap international phone calls without requiring a data connection. You enter the phone number in the webapp and it calls you.

Next time you're using poor hotel wifi or you're frustrated with skype (e.g. multiple disconnects per hour), try PhoneCard for a high-quality call.

PhoneCard can call most places in the world, and in some countries you can also purchase incoming numbers that will forward calls to you internationally.

Still very much a beta product, but check it out at https://www.getphonecard.net

Also working on an Android app which I hope to release soon.

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Eh, didn't work for me. I entered the number of my mobile phone and my landline, and neither rang.

I guess it's just an issue pertaining to Serbia (or maybe I'm doing something wrong?). No service works here unless they specifically mention they do. It's a frustrating thing :)

Worked for me, and I live in South Africa. Maybe you left out the country code or got the format wrong?

I tried again. "Unfortunately it looks like you've reached the free trial call limit." Bummer.

I just saw your call in the logs! It will work in Serbia, but I need to do some additional work on the backend to enable certain countries that are typically high cost to call. I had already done this, but apparently it wasn't complete.

For now, I've reset your trial call limit and it should work for you.

Whoa, it works! I was surprised to actually see a service with such a wide coverage. I've made an account and verified it, and all seems to work smoothly. The only thing is that I can't find any info on how much the messages or calls cost. Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

I'll also be sure to recommend you to people I know are having this specific difficulty of poor call quality with Skype or Viber. That's a great service you've got there, and keep up the good work :)

Awesome! I agree that I need to improve the cost discoverability. The problem is the matrix of rates is huge. In some countries, costs are different per mobile provider, and landlines are usually half the cost or less than mobiles. For example, calling Serbian landline to the US would be roughly $0.20 per minute. Serbian mobile to the US would be roughly $0.55 per minute. That all changes when you call somewhere else.

Of course many countries are not nearly so much. I also do plan to add voip calling within the app. This would allow you to skip the high cost of crossing Serbian boundaries when you're near a decent internet connection, but give you flexibility to make calls directly over the PSTN when needed.

Check out the UI for 'webcall' at didlogic.com. I use this service for the exact use case you're targeting, but it's a slight pain because:

1) I have to use Safari instead of an app, so it can't interact with my phone's address book. So I have to copy-paste the two phone numbers.

2) I almost always have to log in each time I use it, because the auth session has timed out.

3) I have to zoom in/out as it's not mobile optimised.

If you could offer the same quality and price as didlogic.com, but with a convenient app interface, that would be awesome.

Oh, and SMS is quite a bit more limited at this time. You wouldn't be able to send SMS from Serbia to another country, or SMS within Serbia, but you could purchase a number in a destination country like the US or UK and send/receive SMS via the webapp.

I like this a lot. Let's be honest, there's not a lot of services built that are geared towards a small customer demographic of limited means. Which is what this service is geared towards. Those with huge expense accounts don't care about paying ridiculous rates for roaming charges. These types of services seem geared towards people who don't have that luxury and are in a location that doesn't have an internet connection of sufficient quality for skype. This is a demographic that I belong to for quite a few months of the year. ++ from me.

This could be huge. I've tried using Skype and Viber when talking to people in different countries and they are absolutely terrible in terms of audio quality.

Glad you like it! The service came out my own experiences trying communicate with friends or family across international boundaries. Skype and others are fine when they work, but when traveling, they often fall short. Poor or no data connections, flaky apps, or even just moving out of wifi coverage can really kill your conversation.

PhoneCard doesn't even require a smartphone, so you get that much more flexibility.

This is product that really solves a need for me! Right now I use a google voice number that I have set to forward to my Canadian and American numbers, however I cannot have it forward to my Indian number or some of my other VOIP numbers. I get an error when I try to purchase a number though, so not sure if the functionality for that is completely built out. Either way, will keep tabs on this to see when I can switch over completely.

Well, number purchases do work when you top up with credit first! :) The problem amounts to the app realizing you don't have any credit but not showing an error message. This is the top issue I'm working to fix.

FYI, pairing PhoneCard with Google Voice can require a few tries. I've had issues intermittently where Google Voice wouldn't ring for the verification call, and even then it didn't always forward to PhoneCard like it should. Then again, Google Voice often causes me to miss calls.

If anyone else has problems crop up, please email me at support@getphonecard.net.

Tried to take it for a spin, and it worked fine until I received the call. But I only heard "thanks for trying phonecard" and the call disconnected.

This is something I'd actually pay for, if it works as well as advertised! Cheers!

PhoneCard probably didn't like your destination number (either invalid or deemed too much for the test call). If you (or anyone else) would like to give the real thing a spin in exchange for some feedback or ideas to make the app better, please email me at support@getphonecard.net and I'll give your account some free credit.

How would you say this compares to a "virtual calling card" service like KeepCalling.com? (Dial a local KC number, enter your pin, and then dial your desired phone number in the US or wherever.)

Actually it looks fairly similar! PhoneCard has multi-ring on incoming calls which I don't see there, but I didn't investigate deeply. How is the call quality?

It's, ehh, OK, but not that much worse than normal cell service. I also think there's a bit of delay, at least sometimes.

Prices are great, though.

Whilst we're talking about virtual calling cards, Rebtel is the best implementation of this I've seen. There are at least three ways to use the service:

1) The way you described: call a local number, then dial your desired phone number. It uses caller ID for authentication. Not perfect, as it can be spoofed, but likely not an issue.

2) You go online and enter the phone numbers of several people you call often. For each, the system allocates you a local phone number. So, e.g. when I call a specific local (Beijing) number, my mum's phone (in London) will ring. No PINs or double-dialing.

3) Like (2) BUT using their app and a data connection (even a slow one) you just dial the number (or choose from your address book) and their app does everything for you.

2 & 3 work because you already registered your mobile number with them. When you dial one of their local access numbers, they can combine those two pieces of information to look up where the call should go.

The call quality is great. It's a little more expensive than didlogic.com, but cheaper than Skype.

Thank you for pointing me to this! To date I had not seen anything similar.

Perhaps the biggest differentiator is that PhoneCard works in the opposite direction, too. For example, you can purchase a phone number in the UK and have it forward to a US number. Also, PhoneCard calls you, while Ringo appears to make an outgoing call. In much of the world besides the US/Canada, incoming calls are free (even on a mobile/cell phone), so this means you pay for the call once instead of twice.

That frustration was exactly me this past week! WiFi was terrible and even the hotel phone didn't work. Sounds cool :)

I'm curious - do you use a single company for call termination, or have multiple routes to optimise the cost?

PhoneCard is entirely powered by Twilio.

I missed the call to confirm my number. I don't see an option to retry the call. What do I do?

Please email me your number at support@getphonecard.net and I'll manually fix it.

sounds like http://www.jajah.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jajah

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