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Sign up for google voice, wait three months for the invitation.

Fill in the numbers.  If you have a landline or cell phone or an ATA VOIP 
(voice over internet protocol) device hooked up to broadband you can now 
log into your account (only took me 3 minutes at 233Mhz with Seamonkey 
1.1.19 - Opera won't work there) and send/receive SMS messages and make 
outgoing phone calls from US to US at no charge.  Calls from US to 
elsewhere are not free.

Firefox 2 from DSL would probably also work with GV.

I don't know if this would also work with a softphone.  Google apparently 
rings both you and the number you want to call, so you need something 
resembling a phone.  I had SJphone working once in BL2 on a desktop.  It 
will not call voxalot 6-digit numbers but will call regular phone numbers 
(via a paid service like justvoip).  I think I needed glibc 2.3.2 or later 
(SW11 is 2.3.6) and X.  pjsua is CLI but I don't know how to use it.

Having purchased and returned two defective ATA (analog telephone 
adaptors) for VOIP, I am using two 300MHz laptop computers instead (with 
Win2K since nothing else but Mac worked reliably in both directions) and I 
will test them for free outgoing GV calls.  (And Win2K to call 6-digit 
voxalot numbers?).

I sent free SMS messages to two people who never read email, telling them 
to read email.  VOIP providers charge 7.7 cents per US text message.

Google says it will 'call your phone' which I thought meant dial the other 
person, but they literally do 'call your phone' and make it ring.

You still need to pay for calls out of the country but there may be 
websites providing those free too.  voipalot charges .003 cents/min in the 
US plus 4 cents/call.  Other providers charge differently ($3/month plus 
.010 or .015 cents/minute after 300 min/week).  Different rates overseas.

Sindi Keesan