Is It Worth Using Gmail To Make Phone Calls?

As part of a global expansion of its phone-calling capabilities, Google has lowered the rates for making phone calls through Gmail. How do they stack up price-wise if you want to make calls in Australia?

Australia on the whole isn’t an officially supported destination for full-blown Google Voice, so you can’t associate a local phone number with a Google account. If you just want to make calls, but, you can do that through Gmail. The feature is being rolled out by degree; if it’s been enabled in your account, you’ll see a green phone icon above your chat contact list.

For calls to Australian numbers, Google charges $US0.02 a minute for landlines, $US0.14 for mobiles and $US0.10 for satellite numbers. Those rates are pretty similar to casual-access VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services and would save you money on cheaper calls, nevertheless are more than you’d pay for most dedicated VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services, which usually don’t time calls to landlines. For comparison, Skype charges $0.019 cents a minute for landlines and $0.168 cents a minute for mobiles, which is ever-so-slightly cheaper and in Australian currency.

GV is free to call locations in the US which is great so it’d be nice if those free calls would expand to other places worldwide.