Keep your US number and call from it too (for free)
Now that I have relocated to India having sold my car among other things, I was confronted with a new problem - many tools and products assume or prefer that their users are US based.
For example, logging into my US bank account from abroad throws up a gate page asking me to acknowledge that my use of the bank's site from abroad is governed by an International terms of usage.
I also wanted to continue calling my US based friends and family at low cost. This post is about how I solved this particular problem.
Receiving US calls in India
- Port my US mobile number to Google Voice for a one time $20 charge. This process takes about 24 hours to complete*
- Purchase a Twilio number. Twilio charges $1/month
- Create a TwiML Bin which blindly forwards all calls to your Twilio number to your India number. You may have to enable call forwarding for India if your India mobile number prefix is not known to Twilio. I had to raise a request with Twilio support because my prefix of 9102 was not known to Twilio. This takes a couple of hours and I had to submit a copy of a photo ID (my US driver's license)
- Forward all calls from Google Voice to Twilio which will, in turn, forward calls to your India number for less than 4c/minute all told
Making US local calls from India
- Set up a super cheap VPN server on Digital Ocean with the server located in the US. You can also pay for a VPN service. This should cost you between $5-$10/month
- Setup a vpn client on your mobile phone
- Every time you want to make a US call, turn on your VPN, launch the Google Hangouts app, and make calls to US, Canada, and Mexico for free
Let me know if you have any problems getting this to work.
* I chose to port to Google Voice instead of directly to Twilio because I wanted to use Hangouts to make free outgoing calls. Twilio does not provide this feature.
(2017-Sept-10 edit) This has now been launched as a standalone product called You.S.A - Go Stateside virtually