A couple of weeks ago when I was in bed with the flu I had an interview for a position in a new team at IBM. I had been waiting for weeks for the interview, so I really didn’t want to reschedule it – especially given how difficult it had been to come up with a mutually agreeable time for the interview.
The challenge was that the interview was over the phone with someone based in Raleigh, North Carolina (on the east coast of the US).
Now, for work related international calls from home, I usually use a dialing prefix carrier override service (Telecorp) and those bills get paid by work. The problem is that the phone line the override is set up on is on a second phone line where the only phone on that line is in the study – and I was in no fit state to get out of bed, walk to the study, sit at my desk, and have a conversation for an hour.
I had my wifi-enabled laptop with me in the bedroom, and I had the cordless phone (our personal phone line). I decided to make the call to the US on my home phone line – because we have Internode’s NodePhone Voice over IP (VoIP) service running over our ADSL link and carrying all our personal calls. I prefer NodePhone over other services such as Skype for most calls because it is completely seamless (you wouldn’t know you are using VoIP – we just use our normal telephones as we always have), and it is carrier-quality … Internode’s network has been specially tuned to ensure that VoIP call data is given priority to ensure clear transmission and high reliability. Works wonderfully well.
I got the bill for that call today. 56 minutes and 45 seconds. AU$2.99
Under $3 for nearly an hour call to the US with a quality as good as a normal phone call. Gotta be happy with that!
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