SIPphone's Gizmo Project offering free VoIP calls to PSTN

24 July 2006

The Gizmo Project, a soft-client VoIP service launched in August 2005, announced on 20 July that it is offering free calls to the PSTN in over 60 countries. For countries where the called-party pays the "premium" for mobile calls (US, Canada, China and others), the free calls offer means that Gizmo users can call contacts who are on the move.

 SIPphone's Gizmo project has been growing steadily during the last year, riding on the coat-tails of the runaway success of Skype's PC-client-based VoIP. Gizmo is an SIP-based PC-client offering on-net phone and instant messaging services - similar to Skype, Microsoft, Yahoo! etc. Unlike its rivals, Gizmo uses the SIP protocol, and the SIPphone service can be used with standard VoIP hardware if the user prefers a more standard hook-up. Since January 2006 the Gizmo project client also inter-works with Google Talk's instant messaging and presence capabilities. However, as far as we are aware it doesn't extend to end-to-end VoIP phone calls between the two, much as Microsoft and Yahoo! do not yet inter-work for voice services.