The Frugal Traveller tells us how to reach and be reached by phone from any country:
Throughout the call, neither Gary nor I was particularly worried about the
cost of the conversation. That’s because, over the past few years of traveling
internationally, I’ve developed a system that not only lets me make inexpensive
local calls but also allows friends and family back home to reach me cheaply.
It’s a little complicated, but bear with me and I’ll explain.
I posted some options for less-complicated (and probably less expensive) ways to keep in touch with family and friends while on the road over on our blog.
This allows our family and clients to all call us on a local number (we have numbers for New York, Toronto, St. Louis, and Oxford, UK) that routes (without requiring Skype) to our landline in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The challenge with the Skype-based solutions is that the “Skype-in-to-Skype-out” solution that allows a call from your friend’s regular phone to your regular phone introduces a lot of “hops” into the call’s route, which results in a rather poor quality call (the times that I’ve tried it).
For outbound calls, I use Jajah and I’ve just started to try True Phone.
I gave Fring a try, but couldn’t get it to Skype-out consistently.
Three cents,
Phillip.
There’s also the (just released) Skype for iPhone: http://www.skype.com/download/skype/iphone/