Singapore’s very own Net telephony provider Mediaring has an under-advertised service called Mediaring Talk which lets you call from your PC to any phone – both mobile and landline – in Australia, China, Singapore, UK, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong and USA – for ABSOLUTELY FREE.
It works just like Skype, you download the client to your PC, turn on the speakers and mic and start yakking away. We all know nothing is free in this world so Mediaring limits it to 10 minutes per call. But you can always make multiple calls of 10 minutes each.
So how is Mediaring gonna monetise this? Well for one, it hopes to make from the calls you make to other destinations that is not in the list of eight. Secondly, Mediaring has developed a special “skin” that integrates customised banner ads into the Mediaring Talk user interface and are charging advertisers – like SIA – $X for every mnute that a MediaringTalk user is connected to a call.
Nothing is really for free in this world, but who cares if you are saving big on your IDD bills in the meantime. The promotion is supposed to end this month, but the CEO of MEdiaring has assured me he will extend it for a long long time.
The best thing is Wireless@SG will be easier to log in next year, when most phones/laptops will sign up automatically. This means to make a VOIP call you don’t need to sign in with that irritating Wireless@SG username and password. It’ll be much easier to make a VoIP call at free hotspots.
They unfortunate thing is that they don’t have a Mac client.