If you’re grumbling about the fact of roaming charges on your phone – don’t fear! There is help available. While many people are well aware of VOIP protocal to make calls they aren’t very aware of how to answer their voicemails to see if anybody has called them in the first place!

I found these great iphone solutions online, but there should be similar methods for other phones, and carriers. So, first on our list is how to actually make calls without losing a bundle of cash! Let’s say we’re in a place like oh, say London. Wireless internet is everywhere in countries like this, your hotel probably even has it.

Now, be sure you turn off your data network service! Even if you are connected to wifi it could be working in the background, and costing you cash. Many services allow you to enable airplane mode which will shut down your network, but still allow wifi. You may also have options for this in your settings interface, or may simply be able to ‘turn off data roaming’.

Making calls for cheap over VOIP

VOIP for those who don’t know, is voice over internet protocol. The iphone, and pretty much every other smart phone has many options for this feature. It’s not free, but it is dirt cheap. International calling can happen for about six cents a minute. Many carriers such as Skype even have flat rate packages where you call all you want for one monthly fee. If you don’t have a smart phone, you can also make calls with a laptop, and a microphone.

Fring

Fring is an all in one tool. It allows you to use a multitude of popular IM services, and make calls with your skype account! Pretty nifty, but not as flashy as some of the other apps.

Skype

No surprise, skype allows you to do anything, and everything with your Skype account. While it’s not a swiss army knife type of app like Fring, it is much better looking. The interface is much more streamlined.

iCall

This app has the interesting ability to select to answer an incoming call with wifi, or switch an already in progress call to wifi!

Checking your voicemail

Now, the next problem is checking our voicemail. This doesn’t work over only wifi, because it requires your carrier’s network to access information. Even if you are connected to wifi your edge or 3g network is hard at work in the background fetching voicemail for you.

This step is totally free with an account from You Mail. This service allows you to check your visual voicemail via e-mail. You can also opt for text messages, but this won’t help us since we don’t want to use any data services! It also includes many other useful services like forwarding voicemails, leaving custom messages, and more. You can even get called ID on any caller, even if they aren’t in your contacts. You can also block callers too, and leave them a message to let them know their call is not welcome.

The only thing to note is this service will only send voicemail to your You Mail account. Your provider will not recieve it so it will not appear in your phone’s voicemail. If you only want to use this service while travelling you can easily turn it off again when you get home!

Originally posted 2009-07-11 11:36:50. Republished by Blog Post Promoter