International Travel with JAJAH
Now that many people are taking vacations, we are getting a lot of questions about how to use JAJAH while traveling.
Anyone who has traveled internationally understands how incredibly expensive it is to make and receive calls from abroad. Long distance and roaming charges can add up to several dollars per minute in many countries. Phone bills have been a shock for people using their cell phone abroad and receiving their first phone
bill when being back home (we paid $600 once just for some incoming calls during a three day stay in Israel).
With JAJAH, you can avoid both the long distance and the roaming charges and get your calling costs down to nearly zero.
The JAJAH team travels a lot, and we have team members all over the world so we use JAJAH everyday to stay in touch. We were recently at meetings in Vienna, Austria and here are four example scenarios how we were able to avoid the expensive charges and talk globally as long as we wanted:
1. From the office (or a friends house): This is the easiest. If you are working abroad, or staying with someone who has the Internet and a phone, you simply use your computer and JAJAH as you always would. Simply go to www.jajah.com and enter the local number (landline or mobile), then enter the number you are calling. Hit call. Your phone will ring, as will the destination number, you both answer and talk.
2. From The Hotel: Our hotel in Vienna has Internet in the lobby, but not in the rooms yet. In this case, you go to www.jajah.com on the lobby computer and make the hotel room your originating number. With JAJAH you can schedule your calls, so enter all the calls you want to make and then go to your room and wait for your phone to ring. JAJAH will complete your calls as scheduled.
Many hotel rooms in Europe use the room number as the last digits of the phone number, so your call will go right through. If the hotel has a PBX and your room is treated as an extension, you enter the hotel number, leave a space, type in the letter X and then enter your room number.
3. Being mobile abroad: This is the preferred method of the JAJAH team. When you get to the country you are visiting, stop and get a local SIM card - which you can get at virtually any convenience store for as little as ten dollars, which often even includes call minutes. Enter your new local number as your JAJAH number and start making international phone calls at local costs.
4. Wi-Fi Access: You can also use a Wi-Fi enabled phone to initiate the above scenarios. Since JAJAH is a web-based application, you simply go to mobile.jajah.com on your mobile device and then send the call to any phones you want. This is how we used the Apple iPhone while in Europe - we used the iPhone’s built in Wi-Fi to send the JAJAH call to a local landline or local cell phone (as mentioned in Walt Mossberg’s July 19 article).