Rebtel vs. Talkster

I was looking for a way to get in contact with a few friends that I have across the globe, but I wanted to avoid paying the high cost of international calling. I have used Skype and Google Voice before to call, they have pretty decent

rates but it’s not completely free. Another thing that I was looking for is a way for my friends to call me back which I was at first willing to pay for, but thankfully now I don’t have to.

So I stumbled upon Talkster. Talkster is a free way to internationally call and simple to use giving each contact a local number to call with. After the new local numbers are provided to each contact (by sms possibly) by Talkster, both people can use their local numbers to call each other completely free, but there’s a catch. You used to just listen to a 10 second ad, but I didn’t encounter that in my tests. The catch is that as soon as either of the two contacts call each other, the caller has 10 seconds to tell the recipient to call him/her back on the number that was provided to the recipient via text message or other method. After this is done the call is free. I really enjoy the simplicity of Talkster, but it drops calls like crazy. Usually in my experience at least, after about 4-5 minutes the call was just disconnected. I wonder if it’s just from high use of the service or some other issue.

After Talkster I looked for a more stable option where I could stay on the phone more than 5 minutes.

I found Rebtel, Rebtel requires you to make an account which Talkster lacks, but it seems to work a lot better. Rebtel has paid options to directly call internationally at fairly cheap rates (I still prefer Skype and Google voice for paid calling). The free call on Rebtel is called a smart call and it’s basically the same premise that Talkster has which requires a call back. It doesn’t disconnect and works fairly well. Below I have a small tutorial for Rebtel. Talkster is pretty self explanatory.

1. Make a Rebtel account using any phone number you like.

2. Add a contact, you will need to name the contact, provide the email address where a number that they can call YOU with will be provided to the contact by email and you will also need to input their phone number of course. Click save.

3. Beside the contact there should be a local number for you to call, when you call it, it will call your contact directly, and for the call to be free, your contact needs to hang up and call the number that showed up on their caller ID. After this is done I believe that the call is free and should last a while. The same I think works for the other way around, if the contact calls the number that was provided to contact you in the email, you must hang up, do the caller ID thing like *69 basically, and then since your calling Rebtel, you need to verify that you’re a member and then input the phone number that’s related with the account and the call will connect and its free. Also if you’re the one calling back, you may need to use the local access number instead (top left of contact page under Rebtel logo) of the number on caller ID because I’ve heard that it doesn’t work sometimes.

If I had to pick, I would choose Talkster because of the simplicity, but it drops calls often so it’s not worth using for lengthy calls. Rebtel is basically exactly the same thing except it requires an account.