Keeping in touch with friends and family can be a frustrating and costly business – especially if they live abroad. Letters are notorious for going astray and, if you need to speak to someone to deliver important news, international phone call charges can seem a little extortionate, especially in the current economic climate, making regular contact perhaps not as regular as we'd like it to be. The dawn of email and broadband has made the world a little smaller and certainly less expensive, but there are some occasions for which only the sound of a voice will do.

Thanks to broadband technology, VoIP phone calls are becoming more and more commonplace. This technology utilises your existing high speed Internet connection to send and receive telephone calls at a much less expensive rate that traditional telephones. Cheap international calls or even free international calls are now a reality, thanks to VoIP. Free international calls do offer some restrictions but, if you're prepared to sign up with a VoIP service provider for cheap international calls, you gain flexibility alongside some low cost options.

In order to make free international calls, the cheapest option is to use the ‘PC to PC' method. As its name suggests, phone users use their computers as telephones to speak to each other, using headsets, microphones and speakers. While this does mean you don't have to pay for the call, it also means that you do not have the freedom of a telephone: you are tied to the computer and the other party must be using the same or a compatible system to receive the call. This method does not allow you to make free calls to mobile phones and landlines; you will be charged for these by the minute. In addition, the sound quality is not as good as traditional phones and the signals involved can often break up and disconnect the call.

Using a ‘landline to landline' VoIP provider gives you the flexibility of a traditional phone, but offers you cheap local and cheap international calls. Using an adapter sent to you by your provider, which your telephone and broadband modem or router plugs into, you can then begin to make and receive phone calls. The beauty of this lies in the fact that, unlike the PC to PC method, the other party does not have to have a computer and your regular digital telephone will work, regardless of whether your computer is switched on or not - its connection to your modem allows it to access the correct bandwidth at any time. In addition, you don't have to worry about calls breaking up and the sound quality is indistinguishable from that of traditional call. Using a VoIP provider to benefit from cheap international calls, you pay only a monthly subscription fee for the countries you want to call, so you'll know in advance exactly what the cost is.

As telephone companies continue to increase the costs of international calls, it is small wonder that many consumers are changing their providers and either signing up with VoIP providers or using their personal computers to make free international calls.