Free Calls to almost any PSTN phone. Sound familiar? Yes, those crazy days where PSTN calls were free are returning. My motto has always been “you get what you pay for”, but sometimes free open standards stuff can pave the way for some great technology.
For instance..
Xten released the the free X-Lite VoIP softphone nearly a year ago now and today it, along with it’s big brother X-PRO, are probably most used SIP softphones on the market today.
Then Xten announced a free NAT and Firewall traversal solution, XTunnels with hopes that this will assist providers in softphone deployments.
Soon MyPhoneBooth.com will allow users to call any PSTN phone from a web page for free. The offering is part of an effort to test some of the technology that may be included in peerSee. The name will probably change but I was tired of referring to it as the Free, Open Standards, Peer to Peer, Instant Messaging, VoIP and Video over IP client application 🙂
Free can be good but in the end, as a provider, if you want to rely on a service or application you will also want to call the support team when it breaks.