Facetime and International Calls

[macintologist]

I video chat with my mom who lives in another country on Skype (of course because it's free).

So with Facetime, what does Apple expect you to do, dial an international number and pay $3 a minute in order to do wifi video chatting?? It seems Facetime is only geared for domestic calling, yet in their promotional video at the keynote they showed the US soldier in Iraq doing Facetime with his pregnant wife back in America. Does Apple expect this soldier to pay whatever egregious international dialing rate in order to do this?

I wonder if there will be a way to simply do Facetime without having to make the call first, kind of like how...... you guessed it... Skypes works!

 

[LimeyBastard]

Other than the initial "ooh-aah" factor, I don't see much use for "facetime" at all. However, having the hardware in place should open the door to many more practical applications of it in the near future.

Anyone who has both skype and facetime available to them will surely use skype wherever possible and facetime will be relegated to those isolated moments when you find yourself stuck in an Apple advertisement (ie. in a motel that conveniently has awesome wifi, far away from your hot wife and freshly hatched child).

 

[jtara]

We'll know when the press gets their hands on iPhone 4. Until then, we can only guess.

My guess is that the phone number is just used as an identifier, and you'll have no problem with your intended use.

Apple is all about the path of least resistance. No stupid additional account. Just a phone number, which you already know.

From another thread here, it looks like you might be able to initiate Face Time while already on a voice call, or initiate it from the start in which case it would not use the cell voice calling.

People are going to get confused for a while because it is initiated from the Phone application. But that doesn't mean that it has to use voice calling.

 

[apachie2k]

I video chat with my mom who lives in another country on Skype (of course because it's free).

yet in their promotional video at the keynote they showed the US soldier in Iraq doing Facetime with his pregnant wife back in America. Does Apple expect this soldier to pay whatever egregious international dialing rate in order to do this?

while it doesn't really answer your question, we don't know for sure the soldier is in Iraq - he could be at a base in the good ol' u.s. of a.

 

[BeyondtheTech]

Considering that FaceTime is likely just a standard voice call with a two-way video overlay over Wi-Fi, I suggest you pick up a Skype To Go number and call that instead, thereby making a local phone call over Skype to the international country of your choice, then hitting FaceTime once connected.

 

[Revelation78]

Considering that FaceTime is likely just a standard voice call with a two-way video overlay over Wi-Fi, I suggest you pick up a Skype To Go number and call that instead, thereby making a local phone call over Skype to the international country of your choice, then hitting FaceTime once connected.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/932558/

With the discussion we're having in another thread - it looks very likely that a cellular connection will not be necessary.