Hack60.Make Cheap Long-Distance or International Calls from Your Mobile Phone

Hack 60. Make Cheap Long-Distance or International Calls from Your Mobile Phone

Route calls using Skype, and take advantage of Skype's low long-distance and international call rates.

Works with: Windows version of Skype.

Many mobile phone plans offer low-cost, or even free, limited calling within their "home" geographic area. Not so with long-distance and international calls, for which you normally have to pay a bundle. Using this hack, you can effectively substitute Skype's very low long-distance and international call rates for the more expensive call rates of your mobile plan.

This hack takes advantage of three Skype services:SkypeIn, SkypeOut, and Skype call forwarding. SkypeIn is a prepaid subscription service (see "Try SkypeIn, Risk Free" [Hack #5]), but is a comparatively low-cost way of getting a regular dial-in phone number. SkypeOut is likewise a prepaid subscription service that allows you to call regular phones anywhere in the world at very low rates (see "Try SkypeOut, Risk Free" [Hack #4]). Skype call forwarding is a function that is built into Skype and costs you nothing. In fact, if the international "number" you want to call is actually another Skype user, you don't need SkypeOut at all!

To make cheap long-distance and international calls you need to set up Skype on a machine at home that basically routes your long-distance and international calls by forwarding them to a specified destination (in fact, up to three destinations at once). The three destinations you forward to can be any mix of Skype users, regular phones, and mobile phones. In the case of regular and mobile phones, you'll need to be a SkypeOut subscriber and you will pay the appropriate SkypeOut call rate for the destination.

Now, Figure 6-1 makes the routing process look rather more intimidating than it really is, because configuring Skype to do this is easy:

1. Create a Skype account for the desired destination; for example, aunt_ peg_in_paris.

2. Sign up the Skype account aunt_peg_in_paris for SkypeIn and, if Aunt Peg isn't a Skype user, SkypeOut also. Let's assume that Aunt Peg is a Skype user and has the Skype name aunt_peg and that your new SkypeIn numberchosen to minimize the cost of your mobile phone calls to this numberis [phone].

3. Set up aunt_peg_in_paris to forward calls to aunt_peg whenever you call the SkypeIn number you have set up for aunt_peg_in_paris (select Skype Tools Options Call Forwarding & Voicemail), as shown in Figure 6-2.

4. After you've set up aunt_peg_in_paris as described, the easiest way to make this hack work is to leave the account you have set up for this purpose logged off at all times except for intermittently checking your SkypeOut balance, if required. That way, your calls are forwarded immediately.

5. Now, whenever you call [phone] on your mobile phone, the call will automatically be routed to aunt_peg and your overall call cost will be that between your mobile phone and [phone], plus nothing to forward the call to aunt_peg!

Now, to make all this effort worthwhile, long-distance or international calls from your mobile phone to the desired destination must currently cost you more than a SkypeIn subscription, plus mobile-to-SkypeIn call costs, plus (perhaps) SkypeOut call costs to the final call destination. Fortunately, working out your savings requires just simple arithmetic, as the example in Table 6-1 shows.

Figure 6-1. Routing calls from your mobile phone through Skype, to make cheap international calls

Figure 6-2. Setting up call forwarding

Table 6-1. Figuring your savings for forwarding mobile calls to a long-distance or international destination using Skype, rather than dialing direct (an example)

Cost component	Cost
Number of minutes of talk time per year	1,200
Mobile only
Per-minute call rate to destination	$0.20
Total annual cost	$240
Mobile plus Skype
Mobile-to-SkypeIn call rate	$0.05
SkypeOut-to-destination call rate	$0.03
Call costs per year	$96
SkypeIn annual subscription (30 per year)	$37.50
Total annual cost	$133.50
Cost comparison
Total annual savings using this hack	$106.50
Percentage savings	44%

SkypeOut rounds calls up to the whole minute, but your mobile phone plan might have the same, or a shorter, rounding time increment. Shorter time increments are to your advantage, and longer time increments are to the advantage of your phone service provider (including Skype). If your mobile plan rounds calls using a time increment of substantially less than 1 minute, you might want to factor in the effects of call rounding (see "Round Call Time to Your Advantage" [Hack #23]).

Another way of looking at the money-saving potential of this hack is to consider a business scenario. Suppose that a European company has 50 sales representatives that travel throughout the U.S. and check in each day with the European head office by mobile phone. On average, these calls are, say, 20 minutes in length per sales representative. Using representative costs, the estimated savings might look something like Table 6-2.

Table 6-2. Cost savings from using Skype to forward mobile phone calls from traveling sales representatives in the U.S. to a European head office

Cost component	Cost
Number of minutes of talk time per day	1,000
Mobile only
Per-minute call rate to destination	$0.10
Total daily cost	$100
Mobile plus Skype
Mobile-to-SkypeIn call rate	$0.05
Call-forwarding cost (Skype-to-Skype)	Free
Total daily cost	$50
Cost comparison
Total daily savings	$50
Percentage savings	50%

6.2.1. Hacking the Hack

You can extend this hack to any number of long-distance or international call destinations by setting up a new Skype account for each. This might sound cumbersome, until you realize that this hack works best when none of the accounts set up for this purpose is logged in. That is, apart from checking your SkypeIn subscription status and SkypeOut credit balance from time to time, you can just forget about them.

6.2.2. See Also

• "Give Your Mobile Phone an International Dial-In Number" [Hack #62]