My Experience With Internet Telephony

Right now, for work, we're doing telephone travel surveys for Stratford. Because Stratford is long distance from Waterloo, I had to look into options to keep calling costs down. Travelling to Stratford every night wasn't an option (milage would add up), and I didn't want our surveyor names to show up on call id. So, the best option seemed to be using the internet.

I first looked at Skype, since they're the best-known service, but they charge a connection fee of 6 cents each time you call a real number on top of the 2.9 cents per minute. Bell Internet Talk is the service that I ended up using, which uses Windows Live Messenger. As a service by itself, it worked decently. Quality was good and it was also 2.9 cents per minute without the connection charge per call. The problem arose when I tried to create 5 new hotmail accounts for my 5 surveyors. After 2, Microsoft blocked my IP from creating more hotmail accounts (presumably to prevent spammers), so I had to create them from other people's houses.

Once I got the accounts created, I tried to put money on the accounts (since it's pre-paid). After the first 2 accounts worked fine, I was unable to add money with my credit card anymore. I did manage to get around that (through endless chat sessions with customer service) and set up the accounts with money and set to automatically recharge to my credit card.

Well, as soon as the auto-recharges started happening, my accounts kept getting locked, and no amount of unlocking the accounts and chat sessions with customer service would help. I think that my credit card was raising red flags, since I've never used this type of service before. But even when I tried other cards, my account would still get locked.

So, my conclusion is that phone calls over the internet aren't a bad way to go... just don't try and get 5 accounts going at once.