Live in Toronto

In general, Canada is very friendly towards VoIP technology, so if you live inside Canada as I do, you must have a long list of telecom carriers that offer you good rates to call Canada. But if you are outside of Canada and want to call your families and friends inside, you probably don’t have any handy options to call cheap. A little clarification first: by saying “call cheap”, here I mean the calling rate to be under 5 cents per minute.

So what are the quick options, if any? To me nothing is quicker than downloading a pc to phone software, deposit some bucks, then start calling. If you have the similar mindset we can narrow our search to an array of VoIP software for worldwide internet users. Let’s take a quick look at them:

1. Skype

Skype is quite popular nowadays, and it’s no mistake to go with Skype, the price is 2.1 cent, but with VAT added, it will be 2.4 cent per minute. Skype also offers an unlimited calling plan but it has nothing to do with you – it only offers to North American users where phone calls are already cheap. So you have to go with Skype’s pay as you go plan.

Upside: popular, sound quality and pricing.

Downside: none

2. Vbuzzer

Vbuzzer is a Canadian product, it offers cheaper rate than Skype does when dialing Canada (http://www.vbuzzer.com/ld/callcanada.php) - 1.5 cent per minute. It means 40% cheaper than Skype, and with $10 deposit, you can almost double your calling time with Vbuzzer then with Skype. In terms of quality, Vbuzzer is slightly better than Skype, in voice clarity, much better in voice consistency, according to my experience.

Upside: excellent quality, good pricing, also an excellent instant messenger with multi protocol support.

Downside: none, except as a Canadian company, I don’t know why they are charging fees in US Dollars.

3. Betamax series

I call it Betamax service because it has many affiliate websites, all with voipxxx.com such as voipbuster, voipcheap etc. Believe me there are a lot of them. Each of the sites, at their early launches, are typically offer free minutes to many countries: US, Canada, UK, and many other European countries. Once they build up the user volume, they will require you to make a $10/$20 deposit and they tell you it is good for the next, say, 4 months of free call. You are happy so you make the deposit, but it happens that you don’t call a lot in the next 4 months, Betamax is then charging the full payment and raise their price to very high. Then the next site will be born shortly, if not simultaneously.

As a user, you can play their game by searching the new born site, and take advantage of their “free promotion” – but don’t make any deposit as they may require, because you simply don’t need to, why pay them when there will be always new promotions ahead?

Upside: free or very cheap minutes when promoting

Downside: questionable business practice of revoking deposit and raising price

4. Yahoo Voice

Yahoo Instant Messenger is a very popular IM, but I have no stats to show how popular Yahoo Voice is, it could have millions of users, but not myself yet. In writing this blog, I checked Yahoo Voice website, and surprisingly find that their call Canada rate is very cheap, 1 cent per minute, yes one cent per minute. I probably should try it next time. This company has very broad product lines, but the problem is that none is dominant. What a pity!

Upside: no comments as I have no direct experience

Downside: no comments as I have no direct experience

Here is a video to explain how to dial Canada.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLtHGACYMo

For additional information, please visit Vbuzzer blog about dialing Canada.

http://www.vbuzzer.com/blog/voip-service/how-to-dial-canada-with-vbuzzer-messenger.html

Other related information about dialing Canada

Contents

http://www.vbuzzer.com/blog/voip-service/how-to-dial-canada-with-vbuzzer-messenger.html

http://www.squidoo.com/Dialing-Canada-Really-Cheap

http://johnmathon.tripod.com/blog/index.blog?from=20080924

http://www.geocities.com/torontophonereview/DialingCanadaReallyCheap.html