What Would You Do With Ten Free UK DIDs?!

During last weeks VUC call someone mentioned that there was a new service called UKDDI offering free DIDs in the UK.  They offer ten free numbers from locations all around the UK, where each can be mapped to a SIP URI.

It took a couple of minutes for the utility of this to really sink in. Given that I have a factory full of coworkers in the UK, and I’ll be traveling there this coming week there just has to be something useful that I can accomplish with such a resource.

So I signed up for a free account and picked numbers in the Cambridge area, mapping them to SIP URIs corresponding to my home and our US staff. Thus I now have local calling access to home of coworkers while in the UK. That means free calling back to the US for the coming week for sure.

Of course, being traditional DIDs that means calling through the PSTN to get on-net, therefore no possibility of wideband calling. Since I prefer wideband when calling home I’ve also got X-Lite loaded to my wife’s PC with a ClearOne Chat 50 speakerphone handling the audio. We’ll use Speex Wideband since X-Lite doesn’t cope with G.722. Besides, I’ll likely be using a soft phone as well. When making calls between soft phones Speex WB is a very good codec.