[trotsky]

it's interesting how well some established pricing models can hold up even as the underlying cost structure radically changes. even among this tech savvy crowd people will regard this as some kind of deal even while we all know optical data costs are approaching zero [1].

voice is of course just super low bitrate data with a legacy last mile that (sometimes) requires a DA converter. tricky? not at all. at least in the us and places with a similar regulatory environment it's awesome - actually way easier and cheaper than pushing pure bits, at least when you're up at a tier 1/tier 2 level. imagine if the government mandated free open access peering for local ip traffic - already tiny ip traffic costs would probably drop almost as much as the fiber glut caused. yet that's basically what you can do with voice in these markets, with some exceptions.

every all you can eat voip provider offers 30 days or more free, usually with a lot more features, inbound, no calling restrictions, etc. why not when it will probably cost them way less than a dollar (at least for outbound only) and whatever keywords they are buying on google probably cost several dollars (informed wild ass guess) and aren't anywhere near as qualified.

for comparison's sake if you want cheap US/CA outbound calls it is easy to find deals like 5000 minutes that don't expire for $5.00 and doesn't require any recurring billing.

Now obviously it doesn't matter too much since even overpriced anyone's voip is still a small fraction of an hours work, i just find it funny that people think a free month is some kind of deal yet wouldn't in a million years vote up a story about netflix offeraing a free month of streaming, something that probably costs them a couple of orders of magnitude more.

[1] some rounding errors may apply