Wow, lots of awesome information, thank you IP Daley. I'm not sure a home VoIP will be my best bet just because given the 6 hour time difference I'm often calling during my work hours. By the time I get home from work (usually after 6pm) it's midnight or later over there. But if it's cheap enough it could work for weekend calls.
I will likely be calling primarily to a European cell phone, as the sister I talk to the most only has a cell phone (she lives in Spain). It doesn't sound like the VoIP accounts typically include calls to cell phones, am I reading that correctly?
I do have good AT&T reception, and am currently with AT&T for my cell phone, so Red Pocket could work for me. It looks like Red Pocket PayGo would only charge me 1 cent/minute to call my sister in Spain, although that may be to landlines only...and is that on top of their usual rate?
Correct, most of them typically don't. That said, there are exceptions. As Christof mentioned, there's CallCentric (on my recommended list, but normally not one of the cheaper providers per minute for domestic service) and VoipVoip (not on my recommended list, there's DTMF and general quality issues with a lot of their routing), and both of them actually have good mobile rates to most European countries, especially CallCentric who does Spain mobile at a flat 4.95¢ a minute (which is far better than RedPocket's 25¢ a minute or any of the pricing to Spain mobile carriers through VOIPo and VOIP.ms).
RedPocket's international calling will be billed per minute on top of the flat monthly rate.
Between the Spain mobile contingency and for the sake of simplification, I'm figuring CallCentric is probably going to be the best all-around priced option, even though general European land-line calling is a bit higher priced, so let's move forward under that idea.
Given the need to call during work hours, the fact that you have an iPhone, and it sounds like you may have WiFi access at work (what with the previous Skype usage in the past), you might be able to get by using a SIP phone like
3CX with CallCentric, and then you're just paying for the outbound minutes to Spain (just don't do it over mobile data). However, if there's quality issues, you can still use
CallCentric's own ringback application, but then you'll be billed the 4.95¢ a minute to Spain plus 1.98¢ a minute to connect to your cellphone, making each call cost 6.93¢ a minute (unless you pay for one of the North America 500/1000 packages). Most VoIP providers do "calling card" style support as well, and the cool thing about CallCentric is that you can tie that functionality in with your own private number and set it to kick in only when called from say your cell phone. They also have free NY state phone numbers with unlimited free incoming calls (you're permitted up to two), so theoretically you could also just assign calls from your cell number to one of those free numbers to forward straight to your sister in Spain, giving you a US based direct dial to Spain billed at a price just shy of 5¢ a minute. This move singlehandedly eliminates the need and support for data usage, eliminates the need for SIP clients on your phone, eliminates the hassle of calling cards for a frequently called number, still opens up the possibility of using VoIP service at home/work for other international calling. I know I'm overwhelming you with options and implementations here even with CallCentric, but I'm trying to show you that the reality of these options are nearly limitless when you take control and become your own pseudo Baby Bell.
Clearly, it's important to figure out roughly how many minutes a month you'll actually be using to call her, as knowing this number will help you better understand how worthless "unlimited" services frequently are, but also when they're worth the money. That said, you have the potential to get 200 minutes to Spain per $10 spent. If you figure 15 minutes every other day, that would nearly carry you a month.
Ack this stuff makes my head hurt. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm not trying to shoot down everything you've suggested, just trying to figure this out!
Is there any other app like Skype that charges less money to call from a cell? We can do FaceTime on our iPhones but internet in Spain leaves something to be desired, so that doesn't usually work too well.
The hard part's the learning curve on options. Once you get past that and understand what you're dealing with, it gets a lot easier. You just pick the best fit, configure it, and start throwing money into the machine. Clearly, the internet service issues in Spain need to be considered as well, but video calling always takes more bandwidth than voice. Stick with voice services. If you don't want to do Skype specifically (which, I'm all for open standards VoIP and the ability to tie into the phone network cheap/free, so that's always great), and if your sister has WiFi access on her end with her own iPhone, she could get a CallCentric account as well with a free US phone number and then you could either call directly back and forth for the price of data using 3CX at both ends (the 3CX softphone is like the software equivalent of the OBi100 ATA mentioned before for smartphones), or one of you could call the other one via the free NY state phone number for US domestic calling rates... you get the idea. Again, I don't want to overwhelm, I want to inspire some radical lateral thinking if you guys can't/won't just do straight up Skype user to user type of things... which seems to be the case given the desire to tie in proper phone calling service.
Meditate on the idea, re-read. It's not as complex as it sounds, but its potential options are rather diverse.
As a closing bit, I'm going to throw out a rather antiquated idea to supplement and reduce your monthly international call budget. Be pen-pals as well. Hand write big, long letters once every 7-14 days and mail it to them. Use it as an adjunct to utilizing technology to stay close. $1.10 in postage can potentially relay a whole lot more in text form than 22 minutes of phone calls can due to the attitude and mindset of thinking and choosing your words instead of just immediately talking. With the right envelopes and stationery, my wife and I have sent 8-10 page tomes for that price to a friend in Ireland. It's a dying art form because people don't have the patience for it anymore when they can just pick up the phone, but man is it worth it to cultivate that skill.
