skype call forwarding to a thai mobile number

[hybrid 1]

hi guys ...

some usefull information for some of you maybee ...

 

i travel frequently and always end up with huge mobile bills for incoming calls ..

eg - a call from the UK to my UK mobile will cost me £0.70 per minute incoming and around £1.30 outgoing ..

i rarely use it for outgoing as its only people who need to contact me who phone me..

 

the only thing that stops me getting a thai mobile sim card has been that i did not want to give out a thai number to people to call .. (none of there buisness where i am and don't want relatives etc knowing its thailand )

 

now for the usefull info ..

Sykpe .. most will of heard of it .. many will of used it to phone home ..

but here's the bit i've only just found out ..

1/ get a skype number which people can dial .. i'm in the UK so i will get a number for eg London ..

2/ get a thai sim card

3/ setup skype forwarding of calls to the thai mobile number .. cost of the call forwarding is GBP 0.065 (6.5 pence)($0.11) per minute to a thai mobile number !!!!

 

doing this i can now go and get one of the thai sim cards that give cheap UK calls .. (i'm sure i was told there is one) .. give people in the UK my UK skype phone number ,,, and save myself hell of a lot of money !! last trip i was so busy with phone calls a times that my bill for 6 days was over £180 ! ..

 

as longtallcowboy will recall my phone was forever ringing .. lol .. a right royal pain but when i get paid for being on call and then can have a paid for vacation to los its a neccacery evil ..

[ting_tong 63]

skype ripped me off for 10 euro, if they decide to steal your money, you have no recourse. they will keep your money and you are shit out of luck.

 

I dont care what anybody says on how good they are.........internet theft of 10 euro is theft.

[hybrid 1]

skype ripped me off for 10 euro, if they decide to steal your money, you have no recourse. they will keep your money and you are shit out of luck.

 

I dont care what anybody says on how good they are.........internet theft of 10 euro is theft.

how they rip u off ?

[donny 1]

Don't rely entirely on anything using VOIP, the call quality can be lousy sometimes. Then again, this call forwarding sounds as if it doesn't rely upon any domestic broadband connections, so, you will probably be okay.

 

If you want to keep your location secret, you should check that you can hide your mobile number when you call people back - I seem to remember someone saying that the Thai government doesn't allow mobile number hiding for security reasons.

[donny 1]

I dont care what anybody says on how good they are.........internet theft of 10 euro is theft.

I'll bet you did the same as me: bought the minimum E10 of Skype-Out credit so that you could try it out, made a couple of calls and then moved onto other things. Then, months later, when you actually needed to make a bunch of International calls, you were dismayed to discover that your credit had expired.

 

Having prepaid credit expire is pretty standard in telecommunications, most calling cards even deduct a certain amount for every month you leave credit stored on them. I don't think this sort of cash-grab was a particularly smart way to treat paying customers but the experiation terms were clearly stated when you signed up.

 

You did read the small print, didn't you?

[bob2005 0]

Skype internet-to-land/mobile charges are higher than VoipBuster, VoipCheap etc, which have free calls to UK, Thailand, Australia etc. Well, free if you ignore the 10 euro/pounds charge for 3 (?) months.

[ting_tong 63]

they never added the credit to my account, and trying to contact those assholes does nothing, they ignore you

 

I ended up having to do some "internet fun" with them, and it cost them some time.

 

Dont trust that company, even if its owned by ebay now, they are idiots and theives.

 

I'd rather pay 10 baht a minute off my thai sim card, the call is good quality and I dont get ripped off.

[hybrid 1]

well i set it up .. set forwarding to a thai BG's number i had in my mobile from last visit

phoned the UK numner i had set for skype ..

then chatted away for 59 seconds to the girl on the other end in pattaya .. her english was terrible ,, she probably wonders who the hell it was calling her .. lol

 

the result ..

a clear line .. and a cost on my skype account of 6.5p

 

 

well happy ..

[hybrid 1]

they never added the credit to my account, and trying to contact those assholes does nothing, they ignore you

 

I ended up having to do some "internet fun" with them, and it cost them some time.

 

Dont trust that company, even if its owned by ebay now, they are idiots and theives.

 

I'd rather pay 10 baht a minute off my thai sim card, the call is good quality and I dont get ripped off.

the purpose is not to avoid paying 10bht per min to call the uk from a thai card ..

 

its so i can give ppl in the UK a UK number to ring that will give me a lower cost than recieving a call on a UK roaming mobile

 

6.5p per minute compared to 60p ..

[donny 1]

One thing worth remembering if using Skype to call your TG from Farangland is that, to her, the call will appear to be coming from a Bangkok landline. She may well conclude that you are lying about being back at home and are, in fact, living it up in BKK.

Edited June 10, 2006 by donny

[ting_tong 63]

the purpose is not to avoid paying 10bht per min to call the uk from a thai card ..

 

its so i can give ppl in the UK a UK number to ring that will give me a lower cost than recieving a call on a UK roaming mobile

 

6.5p per minute compared to 60p ..

that may be fine for a short trip.

 

I dont have incoming calls from home, so no big deal for me.

 

If you live there for long stays, you need a thai cell phone, or 2.

 

I just wont let that ripoff company steal from me again.

 

I hate skype, and when I have the time again, I will have more fun with them.

[wrassell 0]

I think this technology is great, I call any US telephone for a penny a minute and talk as long as I like. I had a local phone number in San Fransisco that I could receive calls here with, but the draw back is my internet connection, is sometimes good, sometimes bad. I could do business in the US from a beach chair in Ban Seray with the right stuff, but the draw back there is the time zone difference and the salt air will just eat a computer up in no time. Lastly is all that back ground noise we have here in Thailand, like Leks loud two stroke motorbike going by or Rover barking his dam head off.

 

This kind of technology is really going to open new opportunities for falang and Thai alike here in LOS. In the Philippines call centers are popping up all over the place. Some people bitch about this, they are thinking their jobs are at risk go figure. The internet has created a real global market place that a few years ago was available only to big business. Even with my limited skills I could, if I wanted, Find, secure, perform, bill out, and get paid, all from my house here in LOS, I could do all this via the internet.

[donny 1]

I could do business in the US from a beach chair in Ban Seray with the right stuff, but the draw back there is the time zone difference and the salt air will just eat a computer up in no time. Lastly is all that back ground noise we have here in Thailand, like Leks loud two stroke motorbike going by or Rover barking his dam head off.

I'm not sure if it's actually true that salt air eats up your computer in no time; I'm right next to the sea here in Edinburgh and my computers all last years.

 

I think salt air has more affect on cars, insofar as it accelerates the rusting process but you're still talking about years and years, certainly far more time than it takes for your computer to become redundant anyway. I can imagine that the general humidity of Thailand might effect a PC but, again, I've never heard anyone complaining about it.

 

Anyway, you don't need a computer for VOIP if you use a more professional and actually cheaper VOIP service such as Broadvoice. They provide a small box that you stick your broadband Internet connection and your phone into. Obviously, you can share the broadband connection with your computer too but you don't actually need it to make calls - very handy if you want to be able to switch you computer off occasionally but still receive calls.

 

You can reduce background noise substantially by sticking a high quality phone into the VOIP box; I use a top-of-the-range Panasonic wireless phone base, with an additional base and handset in another room. I also use a Plantronics wireless earpiece, synced with the same Panasonic phone base, expensive but very light and convenient when I'm taking a lot of calls but what to keep my hands free.

 

The dream of working from your home in Thailand is an alluring one but don't forget that working for yourself takes an awesome amount of self-discipline and dealing with customers, particularly trying to get paid, generally takes far longer than you would expect. The parts of your work that you enjoy soon become submerged by all the support tasks you take for granted when you work for a company.

 

Another quirk is that most customers like to meet you in person quite often even though it would save everyone a lot of time to communicate purely by phone and email; it doesn't make much sense but it's a ritual that most businesses owners and managers are fond of. I don't know if the new push behind webcams will make much difference, perhaps customers will become satisfied with talking to you face to face instead of real-world meetings. Right now, however, and unless you have a very unique and in-demand skillset, having only an Internet presence is a tougher sell than you would think.

[mbiggs 1]

One thing worth remembering if using Skype to call your TG from Farangland is that, to her, the call will appear to be coming from a Bangkok landline. She may well conclude that you are lying about being back at home and are, in fact, living it up in BKK.

Very good point, I have received calls from one Thai girl and when I looked at the incomming number, it had a sydney mobile number.

[wrassell 0]

Hello Donny

 

Much of what you say is true. Most people would like to meet face to face the people they do business with. If however you have a good reputation or have been recommended then most people will be willing to do business over the phone or internet. When starting a business from scratch you may have to take some of the less desirable jobs or customers, starting from the bottom as they say. As far as getting paid well I have found that if people are happy with the product or service you provide then most of them are more than happy to compensate you, with a few exceptions of course, maybe I was just lucky. I have completed many jobs purely in cyberspace and have only but once not been paid and that was a small amount. Yes I have worked from a beach front house and I was successful in doing it. Yes, it was work but having that ocean breeze and hearing the surf instead of a boss made it all to bearable.

 

I have no experience with the box VoIP devices but I do know that at times international bandwidth can crawl here in Thailand. Ping times to the US can be up to one second, as for packet loss well sometimes 40 percent or more, all here in Thailand. I have tried several different VoIP services using just my computer and find some work well and some do not. One service will work great one time of the day then another service works better another part of the day. I do know the Vonage box works great in the US with cable internet, but where as using it in a third world country may not give expected results. I would try before I buy because here in Thailand you really cant take for granted that things will always work properly. Case in point is my phone line here in Thailand was down for over two months.