holla atcha boi

I have a continuing saga of how I call home to Australia.

In the beginning there was silence. I waited for people to call me on my work phone and chatted to them at work. I once called home with a bog-standard phonecard, which ticked down 10 euros in about 8 minutes, from memory.

Then I got skype going and started chatting on that, typically from work, since the times for calling Australians in their evenings are between 9am and 3pm here - work time. Around the same time, I got my ADSL hooked up with Free. Their rates were 3c/minute to Australian landlines, while Skype's where 1.7c/minute, but I preferred to use the Free phone when at home because of the superior ergonomics of holding an actual phone. Also, at the end of last year Free lowered their rates to make calls to Australian landlines free. That's cheap, but it didn't help me at work.

Recently Free, in their wisdom, started offering a SIP service in the freebox (ADSL modem). I activated it last night, and tried connecting this morning. X-Lite and SJPhone both had trouble punching through the firewall and/or NAT here at work, so I gave Gizmo a spin. Sure enough, I was able to connect to my freebox at home and via that call my folks in Toowoomba, profiting from the low (free) call rate of my ISP. Sweet.

I'm a nerd, yo. And that shit gets me free calls.