Phone Home

I've been scouring the net for more than a month now on how I can call up friends and family in Manila from here in Washington without having to shell out at least 0.18 cents a minute per call. Phone cards don't work as well as advertised as they charge a connection fee everytime you call and thus end up using a $5 phone card for just under 20 minutes.

We subscribed to Vonage and loving how VoIP works. The concept is that they give you a phone number not tied to the locality where you live which means that you can have a number with a New York area code and use your phone anywhere in the world with broadband internet access.

Now, this is where I got the idea that if there is a Philippine-based provider that offers the same kind of service, I can just order the phone adapter and have somebody bring that when they come here, thus, I can have a working Philippine-based VoIP phone with a Manila virtual number and eliminate the need for us to spend a lot of money on long distance calls to the Philippines - and our friends can actually call us and not having to spend a fortune just to say "Hello". That was the plan... and that is where it became apparent - Philippine telcos are the most idiotic and selfish sonsofbitches in the world (well, next to music companies, anyway)!

Bayantel offers VoIP service that actually cuts long distance rates from Manila to the US from the traditional 0.40 US cents a minute to 0.10 cents a minute. That works! But imagine, if you can bring that Bayantel phone adapter and connect it to your broadband internet access in any part of the world and be able to call Manila-based landlines for free, or even mobile phones for P6.50 a minute! (aside from the monthly flat rate of about P400).

I guess a lot of people had the same idea. I read forums after forums of overseas Filipinos also looking for a cheaper way to call the Philippines and failed. Bayantel blocks non Philippine registered IP addresses from accessing its VoIP servers which means that their VoIP boxes would not work outside the Philippines. Assholes!@

This is one of the reasons why most overseas Filipinos just lose touch with friends in the Philippines and are not aware of stuff happening in their homeland - it's because of the selfishness of the Filipinos themselves. Rather than help out OFWs or OCWs or whatever you call them, who by the way contributes hell of a lot to the corruption of the government officials back home, they try to milk as much money out of them as possible. (Cases in point - this and the outrageous taxi fares from NAIA, nowhere else in the world does the airport have the monopoly on how you can get home.)