From time to time I stumble across something on the internet that is just to good and to useful not to share, this is one of those things.
My family all live on the east coast.. New Brunswick and PEI, and during this time of the year, my parents live in the Dominican Republic, so, phone bills are always a pain in the butt. Yes, I know, you’re probably saying “it’s 2011, who uses the phone anymore”.. well sometimes you don’t want to sit in front of a computer and have a chat, sometimes you want to walk around with a phone and get some house work done while you catch up on all the goings on back home.
Last night I was told about freephoneline.ca . This is a site that has a number of services, but one of the services they have is, they give you a 100% free local number, which you can set up to forward to another number. I found this to be really neat, because I can set up a second number and have it forwarded to my cellphone, which then could give me a business line, and a personal line.. share the business number with work people, personal with family and friends, and now you don’t need to carry around 2 cellphones. Now there are a number of other services out there that allow you to have a second number coming to your phone, if you have a smart phone, for example, you could use Line2.. but line 2 costs about $20/month… freephoneline is 100% free.
So how do you make free long distance calls, just because you get a free number.. well, the title may be a little misleading, because its not free calls to anyone at any time.. but, what we have done is pick the few long distance people who we make most of our calls to, and now we can call all of them for free. Heres how…
Set up an account at freephoneline.ca and select a number that is local to you.. then go into the account settings and enable forwarding.. it asks you what number to forward the number to.. you put in the number of the long distance person you want to call… hit save, and NOW when you call the local number you selected, it will automatically forward to the long distance number you set up.
In short, it looks like this ->
My account with a local number for ME -> forwards to my parents number in the Dominican Republic -> I make a local call for me, it rings on their end.. and there are no fees…
They can also set up an account with a number that is local for them, and it forwards to my number.. and when they call their local number, it’ll forward to me!
It’s really quite brilliant.. and I think its another step in the right direction.. I’m a firm believer that phone companies are ripping us off like crazy, and anything I can do (that’s legal) that “sticks it to them” I try to do, because they are charging me an arm and a leg and profitting 100000000% on everything they charge you.