Protein^® Forum

For the last 6+ months I've been beta testing a new community based project that enables people to make free international phone calls using a sustainable voip service. I say sustainable since many voip services launch offering free calls, but soon end up charging their customers.

This service is different since it can keep providing free calls as long as people are making use of their other service (also free). This one offers members free 0844, 0871 etc numbers that can be redirected in real time to many international destinations. You can also set them up to redirect to different numbers dependant on the time of day or weekend or even straight to voicemail. All of which can be changed in real time just by updating your 'control panel' on the website.

Many people have already blogged that they like/dislike these 0870 type numbers as someone makes money from the call, but the innovative thing is that voipuser take any revenue generated from these inbound 0870 numbers to buy the community outbound minutes. This way the more people who use the inbound service, the more free outbound minutes are bought. The minutes aren't calculated on an individual's usage, but rather are put into the community pot of minutes, so there is an element of trust and people shouldn't abuse the service.

The main purpose of the site is to provide a knowledge base on voip and allow people to 'play' with voip without having to spend any money on it first. If people like it, then they can always sign up to a commercial service provider later. The forum is very active with many voip experts who are more than happy to help people setup the software or hardware for free outbound calls.

Please note that this site isn't a commercial business, but a community based project which is getting a lot of praise for it's innovative promotion of open source voip services and protocols. Unlike skype, the voip technologies used are open for further development and can provide an introduction to the possibilities of using voip for telephony, or better yet, new and innovative commerical ventures using this fast growing and truely disruptive technology.

Very cool.

VoIP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voip
Site: http://www.voipuser.org
Countries list: http://www.voipuser.org/forum_post_1397.html#1397
Skype: http://www.skype.com