Posts Tagged vonage mobile

If you’re heading to the Vancouver Winter Olympics and want to make inexpensive calls back to the U.S., the solution could be as near as your portable MP3 player.

Vonage Mobile offers inexpensive worldwide calling—anywhere there’s a Wi-Fi signal—by turning an iPod Touch into a phone. It also works on the iPhone and BlackBerry models. And the one-cent a minute rate between the U.S. and Canada is hard to beat.

Besides Vonage Mobile—a free download from the Apple app store—all that’s needed to turn the iPod Touch into a phone is is a wireless connection and a headphone set with a microphone (such as V-MODA’s Vibe II or Faze). The program for other platforms can be downloaded from Vonage Mobile’s website.

As long as there is a Wi-Fi signal, Vonage Mobile makes a VoIP connection for international calls—you’re talking over the Internet. That means if you’re using it on an iPhone or BlackBerry, it does not use cellular minutes. (Note: The iPod Touch will not receive incoming calls.)

Installing the program is quick and easy. Vonage’s World Mobile plan offers unlimited calling to more than 60 countries for $24.99 a month and competitive rates to other parts of the world. Vonage also offers a pay-per-use plan by adding funds to your account, in advance, with a credit card.

Other per-minute rates range from two cents between the U.S. and Hong Kong to $13.92 to a UPT (Universal Personal Telecommunications) number. I was also able to make calls within the US with my iPod Touch.

The call quality with Vonage Mobile is good. In fact, I’d pick it over another mobile VoIP service, Skype. While Skype has worked well for me on a PC, I’ve been disappointed with its implementation, call quality and other issues on mobile devices. The results will depend, of course, on the quality of the wireless signal and the headset/microphone used.

After a query from the Federal Communications Commission, AT&T announced in October that it was opening its cellular network to allow VoIP apps to run on its 3G and 2G data channels, instead of just Wi-Fi. With that, I expect we’ll see more and improved VoIP programs for smartphones—and iPods and maybe the iPad, too—in the future.