Andrew Grant

I didn’t think it’d last forever, but I certainly expected it take a little bit longer than it has.

On Friday Techcrunch reported that AllFreeCalls had gone down, and as of today the service is still offline. Gigaom has more details. In summary AT&T were, unsurprisingly, a bit peeved to be picking up the tab for the free-to-customer services offered by companies such as AllFreeCalls and FuturePhone.

I’m not terribly disappointed. AllFreeCalls was an interesting service, but in a week of testing I often received busy signals or connect failures. When I could actually make a call, more often than not the quality was poor.

For a monthly fee of a few dollars I can make international calls on AT&T for around $0.07 a minute to the UK. This certainly isn’t free, but it’s damn cheap and the improvement in voice quality is certainly worth the price in my opinion.

Take note fellow expats.

On TechCrunch yesterday I read about AllFreeCalls, a service which allows you to make international calls for the price of a long-distance call to Iowa. Since $100 of my last phone bill consisted of calls to the UK, this was just too good to ignore.

After dialing the Iowa number I was then prompted to dial my international number as normal, E.g. 011 44 131 555 5555 – An international call to the UK, City of Edinburgh, number 555-5555. It worked perfectly!

The downside of this service (apart from its undoubtedly short life expectancy) is you need to dial a heck of a lot of numbers, and if you don’t have peoples numbers committed to memory it becomes even more awkward.

Luckily there’s a trick, one I used to use to automatically dial through to regularly called extensions.

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