Skype isn't doing the trick... what about Antel D20 number in Uruguay

I have occasion to contact people in Uruguay pretty frequently and I'm tiring of lost or elusive connections through Skype. Antel has a service that allows you to get an Uruguayan virtual phone number in whatever area and then have calls to it get forwarded to a landline in, well, a short list other countries including the USA and Spain.

This is an interesting approach to competing with voice-over-IP, which has certainly impacted what was a windfall years ago: international per-minute settlement fees paid on inbound calls.

What's this, you've never heard of that? It's a big hard-currency cash cow that every developing country takes advantage of in the business model of their telecoms administration. Basically the phone company in whatever country can set whatever price they want to connect that call the last few hundred km. Doesn't matter if you've handed it to them on an overseas cable and its right there - you have to pay that extra cost per minute to have the call go through to the local phone. The disparity in rates between countries? This is the source of it. Voice over IP causes that single biggest area of their revenue to plummet, it disrupts things.

Anyway as voice over IP almost assuredly eroded their revenues, it caused prices to go down. The settlement rates for terminating traffic dropped as well and its possible to call into Uruguay for less than 15c a minute now. (Yes, I'm well aware the price can be far lower... but the quality of that call if it even gets connected is far lower.)

So to compete with this they have this D20 service. Your local contacts call you on your local number and it rings on your designated phone in the USA (or Spain, or a few other select countries). I have to think the quality might be better.

Gets back to that innate love/hate relationship a lot of Uruguayans have with Antel. When the execute a service they do it VERY well. But the idea of giving more money to the government OR having a little extra bureaucracy - that doesn't sit so well.

I'm on the fence right now about whether to pull the trigger. It has the potential to make conference calls oh-so-much easier... :)