I split my time between the Bay Area and Argentina, and so to cut down on my telecom costs, I use VoIP (Gizmo in particular) quite heavily. In this short how-to, I share a trick you can use to get local DIDs (direct dial numbers) in some 50 countries worldwide.

As frequent ETel readers know, I use Gizmo, and like it because it is an open system. This openness makes it easy to combine Gizmo with other services to create a wide variety of useful solutions, such as using Gizmo software as an Asterisk softphone (it supports dual logins to both Gizmo and third-party SIP services).

Gizmo offers their own inbound dialing service, Gizmo In, but it is only available at present in the United States and the United Kingdom. If you need a phone number in either of these countries, Gizmo In will get the job done for only a few dollars per month. But what if you want inbound phone numbers in other countries, whether for Gizmo or another service?

For this, I recommend Voxbone, a Belgium based company that specializes in inbound VoIP service from over 40 countries worldwide. We’ve been using Voxbone for Radio Handi for some time, and have found them to be a reliable and well managed service provider. They have great prices and can provision phone numbers in real-time in most countries.

Their sign up process is quick and easy, a one page web form followed by an email confirmation. Once you’ve created an account, shopping for DIDs is as easy as ordering a Chia Pet from your favorite online retailer. Just select the country you’re interested in, then a city. Voxbone will assign a DID from their pool of available numbers. You can pay via credit card or Paypal. Rates vary from country to country, but are generally in the range from $10-15 per month, with no per minute fees.

Once you’ve bought your phone number(s), then all you need to do is login to manage your account. First, go to configuration:URIs, and create a URI to forward calls to. If you’re using Gizmo, your URI is simply {yourgizmonumber}@gizmoproject.com or {yourgizmoname}@gizmoproject.com. Then once you’ve created a URI, go to configuration:dids:forwarding, and map your numbers to your Gizmo URI. Then call your phone numbers to test them. Calls should ring right through to your Gizmo client, forwarded phone or voice mail depending on how you have Gizmo set up.

The entire process takes only a few minutes, and through Voxbone you can provision phone numbers in much of the developed and developing world (although their Asia coverage is a bit weak, they have most of Europe, Americas and ANZ covered).

While you can do much of this with Skype In, the real value of a service like Voxbone is that the number is portable. You can reroute calls to any SIP/IAX compatible VOIP provider. You might like Gizmo today, but tomorrow you may want to send calls to your own PBX. Another example of how standards based services create more options for buyers.