AllFreeCalls Shut Down

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Friday, February 16th, 2007

AllFreeCalls has been taken offline after a flurry of legal action by a very pissed off AT&T.

The AllFreeCalls service allows people to make international phone calls absolutely free by exploiting a FCC regulation that provides kickbacks on incoming calls to rural phone companies. Users first call a phone number in Iowa and then call out to any of dozens of countries from there. The user only pays the toll to Iowa, if any. See our original post for more information on how it works. Apparently all of these free calls (from AllFreeCalls as well as other similar services) resulted in a jump from $2,000/month to $2,000,000 in subsidies from AT&T to a single Iowa Telco.

In a blog post today founder Pat Phelan says “Our allfreecalls provider in Iowa today took flight due to increasing pressure from a large USA based carrier. We are working on getting a new number up. We expect to be back in business on Monday afternoon.”

We’ll check back in next week to see if the company has found yet another loophole in the regulations to keep (profitably) providing free international calls to people. Until then, you’re just going to have to pay for those international phone calls. Or use Skype. For now, we’ve put AllFreeCalls into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

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