telephone calling cards

You can usually find cards at convenience store, drug stores, groceries. There ARe different companies. You have to look past the cell phone cards which outnumber the regular cards.

Greg

Did you try night shops and internet shops? Cheers!

Have you looked into Google Voice?

Can I use Google voice with dialup? Lenny

Trying to do any sort of modem communication, over any sort of voice-over-IP audio pathway is usually a horrible exercise in frustration. VoIP tends to be vulnerable to packet loss and timing jitter, and many VoIP connections use voice-grade lossy codecs. Even fax connections at 1200 bits/second are difficult to get working well.

High-speed modem connections (e.g. V.90) require a much cleaner and more stable signal pathway... "dropouts" and timing jitter and distortion will bollix them pretty badly. You really need a circuit-switched connection.

I have not personally tried doing dialup-modem connections over GV, but I'd be somewhat surprised if you found it to work acceptably.

We bought our current LD calling card at Costco -- Verizon 700 minutes.

Jonesy

Long ago and far away, SKYPE worked with dialup connections. It had a special codec that it used, and a better one for faster (ISDN and LAN) connections.

That was probably at least 10 years ago, I get "your computer is too slow" messages with a 1.6gHz ATOM processor all the time, and occasionally with a 3.6gHz dual core XEON.

I also get "you line is too slow" messages with a 50mbit down/ 3mbit up aDSL line.

So although it was technically possible to do it at one time, it's not likely now.

I think though we've missed the whole point of the question, he does not want a VoIP solution as much as a callback system and I think Google Voice does that. You go to their webpage and schedule a call, and their system calls your registered phone line.

When you answer, it calls the number you requested and connects the two.

Of course, you need two phone lines, one to dial up with and one to receive the call.

Geoff.

Right... but I interpreted his question to mean "Can I make a Google Voice call, and run a dialup modem connection over it?" My belief is that Google Voice uses a VoIP backbone to carry the call; the endpoint connections are over the PSTN but I believe that the long-distance part of the call is via VoIP.

Probably so. You might be able to click the "Make a call" button, immediately hang up, and receive the first leg of the call on the same phone line, but the timing would be very tricky.

Once you have registered, GV works fine. The quality [to Bangkok, Manila] is very good after the first few seconds. I think the initial registration might be tricky if all you had was dial-up because, IIRC, you do get a callback in that process and need to enter some code within a few seconds. There is a work-around somewhere but I think signing up at a friend's PC with a dedicated connection and useable phone would be sufficient.