New Technology = Lower Phone Bills

(CBS)  Internet phone services, which have been around for a few years now, just keep getting better and cheaper. If the trend continues, companies may start to pay you to make phone calls. Don't laugh – I can easily imagine a company coming up with a scheme like this in exchange for having to listen to a brief advertisement.

Skype, which is now owned by eBay, has long allowed you to make free PC to PC calls and cheap calls to regular phones but between now and the end of this year, all "Skype Out" calls to regular landlines and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada are free.

Rates for international calls depend on where you're calling and whether you are calling a cell phone or landline. In most countries, the caller pays for cell phone airtime so, while Skype charges only 2.1 cents a minute to call a landline in the United Kingdom, a call to a British mobile phone costs 25 cents a minute.

Skype also offers a "Skype In" service, in which people can call you. For $12 per three months or $38 a year, you can have your own regular incoming telephone number from many U.S. area codes and several countries including Australia, Brazil, Denmark, Estonia, France, Sweden, the U.K., Japan and others.

Here's why that's cool: if you have friends or family in a Skype local number service country, they can call you from a regular phone without having to pay overseas charges. Or you can make yourself look really important by putting phone numbers from several countries or U.S. cities on your business card, so it appears you have offices all over the world.

By default, the Skype In service routes calls to your PC and if you're not at the PC, the service has free voice mail so that callers can leave a message. Or, instead of voice mail, you could set up call forwarding to route your calls to as many as three other phone numbers.

There's no extra charge to set up that service, but you would have to pay the Skype Out rates - that is, 2.1 cents a minute, for calls forwarded to the U.S. and many western countries – in order to receive the call.

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Click here to check out Larry Magid's podcast interview of Hjalmar Winbladh, founder of Rebtel, whose customers can make free and low cost international calls.

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If people are calling you on Skype and you're out and about, you can get those calls on your cell phone for a small fee or, if you are out of the country, you could forward them to your phone number in that country. You can also use call forwarding for regular PC to PC Skype calls, paying the Skype Out rates for any calls forwarded to a landline or cell phone.

Skype is a great way to make cheap calls from a PC or Internet-connected mobile device but even I don't spend every waking minute in front of a PC.

For home office, I've subscribed to Vonage which - like similar services from Lingo, AT&T, Comcast and other providers - allows me to make and receive calls from regular telephones around my house.

The Vonage service does require a special adapter, sent to you by the company, that connects to your broadband Internet but other than that, the experience is the same as a regular call. Vonage charges $25 a month for unlimited free calling in the U.S. and several European countries with reduced rates to other countries.

Like Skype, it has a call forwarding service that rings up to five other phone numbers. I use this to automatically route my Vonage calls to my cell phone. I don't even give out my cell phone number anymore: people who call my Vonage office phone will reach me no matter where I am and if I change cell phones, I can just go online to change the forwarding number .

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