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.

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.

Placing ’p’ in the middle of a number causes most cellphones to pause for a few seconds when dialing. This allows you to append the extension to the saved number, but delay the dialing of that part until the automated switchboard has picked up.

However, my T-Mobile MDA wouldn’t let me insert a p while dialing, nor did the Ericsson trick of holding * for a few seconds work. I found the solution was to enter the complete number, including the p’s, as a number for a contact and then dial that contact as normal.

Two p’s seemed to cause the right amount of delay. I also found that inserting brackets in the number after the p would cause Windows Mobile to cease dialing. Spaces however were fine.

Now, lets see how long the service lasts before being swamped or shutdown!