Ever since the introduction of JaJah to the world, the world of free telephony services had been booming with various solutions and services. While each service concentrated on a different market niche, none of the services really is free of charge (at least not in full). For example, JaJah requires you to register and purchase additional air-time, RebTel operates under a similar approach, so does TruPhone and others alike.
Over the past 10 months, I’ve been working closely with a company called Parrot-Media, who operate the PokeTalk.com website.
PokeTalk Website
PokeTalk is a free international calls service, allowing users to make international calls FREE of charge. The service allows a user to make up to 50 free calls per month, of up to 10 calls per calls (that’s 500 of FREE minutes per month). Judging from normal ACD traffic around the world, a normal call duration is around 5-6 minutes, thus, the service is a great solution for making phone calls for FREE.
According to the PokeTalk economic model, the calls are being funded by the advertisement on the website. So, while you watch the ads on the website, the advertisers are paying for your call – it’s as simple as that.
As you may have guessed, the service utilizes the Asterisk Open Source PBX (after all, this is what I do). In addition, it utilizes a highly advanced, high-speed, highly-reliable Asterisk based dialer framework – enabling the system to initialize up to 140 calls per second, and sustain a total of 1200 concurrent phones calls across the entire platform. All in all, a fairly big and robust platform for a new service.
To enjoy the service, simple point your browser to http://www.poketalk.com, regsiter, and start making calls to your loved ones.