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January 21, 2011

International (US) Number with Google Voice and Stanacard

I’ve been waiting for some time to have this working. Little by little the pieces of the puzzle came together and yesterday, it happened: I connected my Google Voice account with the Stanacard International Number Forwarding.

So what? I know have an US phone number (for Boston, of course) that rings up my iPhone in Venezuela (or anywhere in the world where you can get a SIM card).

Why? How can you ask that? Because you can!1

The guys at Stanacard2 posted a good walkthrough on their blog. Let me add that you could have done this before with other international calls services (I tried, twice). In my case, it either didn’t work reliably or the international calls company wanted a monthly plan.

Follow the instructions on Stanacard blog, but here’s the high-level look at what happens when I make a call:

  1. While in “Universe minus USA”, dial a number on the Google Voice App (remember to turn ON Click2Call so Google calls you)
  2. Google calls your Stanacard Number in the US, and they forward it to your local number.
  3. At the same time, Google calls the number in US (or anywhere really).
  4. They pick up and you yell “wazzup”.

If someone calls your US Google Voice number, just disregard the step 1. The magic is the same.

At some point Google Voice will probably add International Forwarding themselves, and I’ll revisit this, but right now Stanacard rates seem lower that Google’s so that’s another thing to consider.

If you’re going to give Stanacard a try, I’d appreciate if you use this referral link. I’ll use it to call you. Promise. Maybe on your birthday.

  1. Seriously, if you have a big corporate overlord to expense your traveling phone bills, or live outside the US but wish to make it easy for people to contact you, it’s very useful. ↩︎

  2. I’ve been using Stanacard for 5 years now, to call home (Venezuela) from abroad (US, Mexico, Europe), and they have always been reliable, cheap and respectful. They’ve had my card number for auto recharge and I don’t recall any incident. So don’t be put-off by the sparse looking website, just tell yourself they are passing the web designer savings to you. ↩︎


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