New Technology = Lower Phone Bills

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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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 .

OK, so we've covered PC calls and calls from home and office but what about those ubiquitous cell phone calls? Many people have plans that allow them to make calls in the U.S. for no extra charge, but calling overseas from a cell phone can be extremely expensive.

Unless you have a special calling plan, a call from a Verizon Wireless cell phone to most European countries costs $1.49 a minute. You can get that down to as little as 20 cents a minute if you're willing to pay $3.99 for a "value plan" but Rebtel, a Swedish company, has a system that can let you make overseas calls for practically nothing.

Rebtel, like Skype, uses the Internet to place long distance calls but instead of using a PC, you use your cell phone or a landline. It's a little more complicated to set up than other phone systems, but once it is set up, it's easy to use.

After subscribing online, you use the Rebtel website to create and register a local phone number for each of the international phone numbers you expect to be calling. Then, when you want to call that person, instead of dialing their overseas number, you would dial a local number that will forward the call to their phone.

If you simply do that and nothing else, you can connect to the phone at a rate that's much lower than cell phone overseas rates. For example, you could use Rebtel to call a landline in France, the U.K., and most other European countries for only 2 cents a minute. Calls to overseas mobile phones are typically closer to 20 cents a minute, because the caller pays airtime.

There is a way to avoid those charges.

In addition to assigning local numbers to the international numbers in your personal phone book, Rebtel automatically sets up a local number that can be used for calls made to you, from a list of 35 different countries. Rebtel doesn't charge for the first 30 seconds of an outgoing call - so if you call an overseas friend's cell phone (by dialing the local number) and if the person hangs up and calls you back on the local number in his or her country, the call will be free.

If the call isn't within one of the 35 countries in which Rebtel operates, the company will charge a fee similar to Skype. Ghana, for example, is 15 cents a minute, which is still much lower than what your cell phone service would charge for the call.

Rebtel charges a dollar a week for the service, but you are only billed for the weeks in which you actually make a call – unlike bills for cell phones, long distance calling plans, and traditional phone service, which we have all learned can be chock full of unhappy "gotcha!"s.