(First of all, thanks to Yan at ProBargainHunter who wrote a review on Jajah and subsequently used it to call me at work last week.)

It’s not the first time I wrote about making free phone calls here at Bargain Blog. Betamax’s VoipStunt allows you to call anyone under their “free countries” for free, as long as you charge up in your account every 120 days. Then there’s also Gizmo Project, where you can call your friend’s line number for free, as long as he/she is also an active user of Gizmo.

Jajah also gives you free calls, but like all the other free services, there usually comes with a catch. The calls are only free between Jajah users. However, what sets Jajah apart from the rest, is its connection mechanism. No special client software is required — it rings your own land line. Moreover, no Internet connection is required besides initiating the call, so your BitTorrent download does not degrade the call quality.

From its own FAQ:

What is the difference between JAJAH and other VoIP services?

The calls made through JAJAH WEB are phone-to-phone, which means you don’t need a headset, a microphone or a special phone to use it, so you don’t have to be tied to your computer. JAJAH WEB also uses the web browser, so you don’t have to download or install any kind of software to use it. Using JAJAH WEB is as simple and as comfortable as placing a regular phone call, only much cheaper.

Well. Many of us do not care whether it is much cheaper, as long as it is free. So, how do I go about making free phone calls on Jajah? Here are the steps:

1. Go to their website and hit register now! Make sure you read through their terms and conditions as there are certain things that you cannot do (like use it to do tele-marketing). You can put up to 3 phone numbers against your account.
2. Ask the person you wish to call to also sign up with his/her own phone number.
3. Now log back into Jajah’s website, select the number you wish to call from, type in your friend’s number you wish to call to, hit that green button CALL!
4. Your number will ring straight away, and you’ll hear the message that “Jajah is connecting you”. It will then dial your friend’s number and connect the call.

Free calls between Jajah users is only available if both the caller and callee are residing in Zone 1 or Zone 2 countries. See Jajah’s rates page for a list of such countries. Currently you can make free calls to those in USA, Canada, China, Singapore and Hong Kong, both land line and mobile. To Australia only land line numbers are free.

Another good thing is, once you put in a number you wish to call, it automatically tells you that whether it is a Jajah-to-Jajah free call or a charged call, so there is no need to keep tracking which one of your friends have signed up to this service.

The quality of the calls is actually quite alright. From the delay and echo’s you can tell that it’s VoIP-backed, but the sound quality is better than VoIPStunt when I tried to call my family in Taiwan. YMMV, as always, and I guess it also depends on the country you are calling.

Now, the tricky part is, how do you get the people you wish to call to sign up? It’s going to be a big challenge to ask my parents to go to an English website, fill in all the required details and sign up to their services. Or sometimes the person you wish to call does not even have Internet access.

Jajah sort of limits you in terms of what phone number you are allowed to register. When I signed up the country drop-down list was greyed out and default to Australia, as it looks at the incoming IP address to determine which country you are coming from. In another word, Jajah is trying to stop you from registering a Taiwan phone number (+886) from an Australia IP address.

Bummer.

Except IP can be easily spoofed using an open proxy. Soon I was chatting on the phone with my parents using Jajah, after registering another account with my parents’ Taiwan landline number :)