Republic Wireless Is Launching Free International Calling - Powered By Their Own Country Code

Republic Wireless, the potentially disruptive mobile phone carrier that uses special hybrid Wifi/cellular phones, has another plan to help spur interest and drastically reduce your phone costs. We’ve confirmed with the company that starting this week, it’s going to let its users to receive international calls to any phone, free of charge. Then, that’s their aim by all means - read on for the details.

For those that missed our initial coverage, Republic Wireless is a subsidiary of Bandwidth.com - a company that gets relatively little attention in the mainstream press, nevertheless whose sprawling Internet infrastructure is responsible for powering portions of many of the most popular VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services, including Google Voice, Skype, Twilio, and others.

Phone carrier that’s a WiFi/cellular hybrid

Republic Wireless taps into Bandwidth’s infrastructure to offer a phone carrier that’s a WiFi/cellular hybrid. Afterwards signing up, Republic sells you a special Android phone that automatically connect to your Wifi networks whenever possible and routes your call via VoIP.

If your phone can’t find any Wifi networks to connect to, it switches over to Sprint’s mobile network. And because much of your usage will be routed over Wifi in other words than a cellular connection, Republic can offer its service at a rate that’s much cheaper than the likes of Verizon or AT&T: it’s only $19 a month. There are a few caveats to that, although - namely, that you can’t use too many cellular minutes.

Which brings us back to this week’s launch, which will allow Republic members to receive international calls for free. To do this, Bandwidth.com has managed to acquire its own country code, which it will be assigning to Republic Wireless.

Matter of fact what the country code is for

Republic has confirmed that free international calling is as a matter of fact what the country code is for, and that it will work similarly to the way other international calls work, just without the fees. If you initiate an international call from your phone over Wifi, it’ll be free of charge, no matter who in the world you call (Update: Republic has clarified that if a country has its own country fees, those would however apply. And when your friends abroad want to call you, they just type in Republic’s ‘country’ code, 883-5110, followed by your phone number, and that incoming call will be free to both parties as then. Pretty simple, right?

To help get the ball rolling, Republic Wireless has managed to land some notable launch partners. Namely, Google, who is integrating support for the Republic international code into Gmail’s phone feature. And Republic Wireless says additional partners will be coming shortly. In the mean time, they’ve as well launched this site where carriers can sign up to support Republic’s International Country Code.

To sum things up,  at this hour Republic’s free international calling isn’t going to be especially useful - your inbound international calls probably won’t be free. However that will change as it announces that traditional carriers have started to come onboard. I’m looking at this as a very ambitious and potentially awesome experiment.

Because if this works out, to the point that it becomes the norm for carriers around the world to support Republic Wireless’s international code, it could actually change the whole game as far as international calling is concerned. Free calls, to any phone, has a actually nice ring to it.