Over the past several months, I have often been on conference calls, often with other technologists using one of the free conference call services on the Internet. These services aren’t really all that free. They are a long distance call, and even for people with a lot of minutes, they eat up the minutes rather quickly.

So, I’ve been interested in finding the best way to have conference calls taking advantage of Voice over IP. Of course a simple approach would be to sign up for Vonage, which for $29.95/month give you unlimited calling anywhere in the United States, or Packet8 with a $19.95/month plan for unlimited calling anywhere in the U.S.

However, that solves one person’s issues, not everyone. Some people, for various reasons, can’t have a broadband-based phone as an external network device.

Another interesting approach is to connect up via SIPPhone. With SIPPhone, you can download an X-Ten Softphone or a Phone Gaim Softphone.

You can then set up a new account with SIPPhone here.. The basic account is free to set up.

If you have a SIPPhone account, you can dial into their conference call system for free. Essentially, you create whatever you want for a conference call number, starting with 1-222. For example, my home phone number is 329 1629, so if I want to set up a conference call with friends, I dial into 1 222 329 1629 This sets up a conference call at that number and anyone else who has that number can dial in.

So, what about people with regular phones that want to join in on the conference? Well, there is a long list of phone numbers you can dial in to get onto the SIPPhone network. For example, if you are in San Francisco, you could dial into 415-354-1083. At the prompt, press 1 to dial a SIPPhone number, and then enter 1 222 329 1629 (followed by a # sign), to join the conference. In theory, if you live in an area with an access number, you could probably set up a conference call with just one other person, in an area with an access number to essentially get a free long distance call.

The downside of this is that at least for the test that I did this evening, the call was pretty choppy with a bit of feedback.