Quote:
Originally Posted by rayo
The question I want to ask, will I be able to ring them if I travel to USA and am in an area with wifi available?
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In most (but not all) cases, yes.
That's one of the advantages (that Voxalot gives you easy access to) of "pure VoIP" (VoIP that doesn't touch a traditional telco line at any point in the call). Since the traffic is all just computer data on the internet, its no more hard (or costly) to have a private "phone call" across international boarders than it would be to listen to an internet "radio station" that is "broadcasting" in a different country.
In both cases, if you have enough bandwidth, and there aren't any firewall/port restriction in place (and remember that if/when even one ISP in the entire chain between the two has such a port/VoIP restriction in place, it will kill the VoIP call), than you can talk all you want "for free" (actually for whatever bandwidth charges you pay to your ISP for the data you are sending/receiving between you).
While I haven't done so recently, I have (in the past) had long (up to 3 hours at a time) international "conference calls" via VoIP. And even though the "calls" were crossing country boarders, and had multiple people (at different locations) "on the line" at the same time, the cost to everyone involved was essentially zero. Technically, we probably all used (and paid for) a trivial amount electricity to power our VoIP and networking equipment. And we also all had to pay our ISPs for internet access to be able to send this computer data between us (from our perspective VoIP acts like a sound voice line, but from the internet's perspective it is all just computer data). However, if (like many of us) you just pay a fixed fee for your monthly internet access, you don't even have an extra charge for the computer data, and effectively you don't have any extra costs (beyond the trivial amount for electricity) for "pure VoIP" calls no matter how much you chat (or how many countries boarders you cross to make that "phone call").