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David Pogue in today’s New York Times tells how to get free or low-cost Internet phone calls. Excerpt:

The price of home phone service has dropped 30 percent since 1999.
Surely, say the analysts, that trend line will eventually plummet all
the way to zero. Surely, thanks to the Internet’s ability to carry your
voice, landline phone calls will soon be free.

Already, dozens of calling services promise to slash your
residential phone bill by exploiting the Internet. And yet nobody has
yet delivered the holy grail: free calling, to any phone number, from
your regular telephone. There’s always a catch.

For example,
programs like Skype offer unlimited free calls — but not from your
phone. You and your conversation partner have to sit at your computers
wearing headsets, like nerds.

Then there are those annoyingly named VoIP services (voice over Internet protocol), like Vonage.
You plug both your broadband Internet modem and your existing phone
handset into an adapter box. Presto: unlimited domestic calls from your
regular phone.

But they’re not free. You pay about $25 a month,
and you hope that your VoIP company won’t suddenly go under, as
SunRocket did last month.

If you’re still forking over $60 or
$70 a month for residential phone service, here’s a guide to some newer
Internet-calling options.

iCall.com. The promise: Free calls to domestic phone numbers.

The
catch: Your friends pick up their phones to answer, but you still have
to sit at your computer. In other words, iCall removes only half the
drawbacks of Skype.

People can also call you from their phones
(iCall assigns you a number, with an extension). But here again, you
have to take calls at your computer, not your phone.

Jajah.com.
The promise: Unlimited free calls to anyone else who’s signed up for a
free Jajah account in the United States, Canada or 35 other countries.
You use your regular phone. There’s no special equipment, contract,
monthly fees or prepayment.

The catch: You don’t talk on your computer — but you need a Web browser to initiate calls. You begin at jajah.com — or, if you have a Treo, BlackBerry or iPhone, at mobile.jajah.com. There, you type in both your phone number and the one you’re calling.

In
about 10 seconds, weird as this sounds, your phone rings: the Jajah Web
site has called both of you, connecting the call from the middle. It
works reliably and the voice quality is good, but having to place calls
from a Web site is a hassle.

The “free calls to Jajah members”
part gets a little complicated, too. The calls are free to both
landlines and cellphones in the United States and Canada, but calls to
overseas members are free only to landlines, and then only in 35
countries (in Europe, parts of South America, plus Australia, Israel,
Japan and Taiwan and others).

When you’re not calling a Jajah member, overseas calls can be  very cheap: how’s 3 cents a minute to England or China?

Calls
to some other countries can still hurt, though. Afghanistan is 26 cents
a minute. Greenland, 50 cents. Cuba — gulp — 86 cents.

And
those are landline prices. Calls to overseas cellphones often cost
five, six or seven times as much. That’s too bad, considering how many
people outside the United States use only cellphones.

The price of home phone service has dropped 30 percent since 1999.
Surely, say the analysts, that trend line will eventually plummet all
the way to zero. Surely, thanks to the Internet’s ability to carry your
voice, landline phone calls will soon be free.T-Mobile. Its new HotSpot@Home cellphones
make unlimited free calls whenever you’re in a wireless hot spot — or
when you’re at home, since a free home Wi-Fi router comes with the
deal. Calls you place to numbers in the United States from overseas hot
spots are free, too.

The catch: Your voice plan costs an
additional $10 a month. Only two bare-bones phone models are available
for this program, although more are on the way.

The free calls
are available only in hot spots that don’t require a login in a Web
browser. (The exceptions: Calls are free from any of T-Mobile’s 8,500
commercial hot spots in the United States — coffee shops and so on.) …

The piece also covers PhoneGnome and Ooma (pictured above). Per usual, the Web-unfriendly Times does a sloppy job linking to some of the websites it’s writing about.