I haven't written much about my service options in Manila other than the ones provided to me by the local carrier here, Global, so I thought I'd go into the intricacies of my setup now.

Local calls via Global are costly and can burn up a 500 p ($10) phone card in about ten minutes, though all incoming calls and texts are free. Outgoing texts are cheap at about 2 cents a message, so texting is the preferred method of communication here. Wireless Internet access on my phone is cheap at 5 pesos (10 cents) per 15 minutes, but if you get disconnected, which can happen often, you get charged again for a new session. Neither maintaining a constant Internet connection nor an intermittent one is practical or desirable as I discovered one night when I burned up about 200 pesos while my phone was tucked away in my pocket. So, I've disabled Internet access on my phone and will only enable it if I need to access something or if I'm extremely bored and don't have access to a computer.

Communicating with friends and family back home is another story altogether. As luck would have it, I received an offer from Skype for a free month of their Unlimited World service just before flying to Manila. I had until July 31st to take advantage of it, so I activated it when I arrived on the 23rd and have been using it ever since. Unlimited World allows you to make computer-to-landline calls in over 40 countries worldwide. While I can communicate with almost everyone I know back in the states using Skype's free computer-to-computer service, and do it with video, I wanted to be as accessible as possible. Once my month expired, I signed up for Skype's unlimited US and Canada plan for an additional three months at $2.80 a month. I also rented a Skype phone number local to New York at a price of $12 for three months. And, of course, I can still Skype for free when calling another computer.

Since I suspended my AT&T service, I haven't been able to use the GoVoGo voice mail service I mentioned previously. That's okay. Voice mail is included in my Skype package. Out of curiosity, I called my AT&T cell number and received this message: "The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time. Please try your call again later." Cool. So, for three months, anyone trying to call that number will hear that message. Anyone who needs to get in touch with me already knows I'm out of the country, and they know how to reach me, so I'm not concerned. By the time I get back to New York, a lot of the undesirables, such as telemarketers, will have written me off and stopped trying to call me.

Enter Google Voice. The thing that appeals to me about this free service is that you have a lot more control over how your calls are managed. It has a lot of cool features I'm not going to get into here. You can check out the link above if you're interested. So, after reading a little about it, I was sold. I requested an invitation to the service.

A few days after I made my request, I received an invite. I clicked on the link Google sent me and it sent me to a page telling me Google Voice isn't available in my country, only the US at this time. It would have been nice if I had received the invitation before I flew to Manila, but what could I do? I really wanted to activate my account because I didn't want to risk the chance of it expiring before I get back home, if it expires. I didn't want to have to wait for another invite. It turned out that my company, in addition to providing me with a laptop for work, also provided me with VPN access to their network in New York. I logged into the New York network--problem solved. Google Voice now saw me coming to their site from a New York IP address and allowed me to log in, choose my new phone number, and access all the features of the site. Once registered and set up, I was able to access the site even when not logged into VPN.

I still wanted to make use of the service, though, and Google Voice won't forward to international numbers yet. Since I'm not using my AT&T account here, that wasn't an option. But since I purchased a New York number from Skype, I was able to set Google Voice to forward to that number. Now, I can get both Google Voice and Skype on my iPhone, so I'm pretty happy.

Labels: Google Voice, GoVoGo, international calls, Skype, SMS