Finarea S.A. is a Swiss company based in Lugano. They operate discount phone services in the form of
conventional PSTN call-by-call in different European markets as well as Hongkong. The VoIP services they operated until the end of 2005 are now operated by a German company, Betamax GmbH whose actual relationship to Finarea SA is not clear.

In August 2008 Finarea has appeared again on the wholesale termination market with an offer branded as SIPTraffic.com. According to the whois records the domain is owned by the same Finarea SA and not by Betamax as all the Betamax brands and it was registered in June 2008.


The new home of Wolf's pages at MyVoipProvider has a rates comparision. But you cant see everything at a glance.

Finarea provider pages: VoIPBuster NetAppel voipcheap sipdiscount

See http://backsla.sh/betamax for a complete daily updated Betamax price comparison chart. It now includes lowratevoip.com, too. Looks pretty decent!

New version of fincheck 25th of June 2008. See below:

---

Charging caveats

Calls to US free phone numbers are charged for, regardless of how many free minutes you have left. This is not mentioned but must be considered deliberate: Finarea have been advised at least twice and given their usual reply: nothing.

28 Jan 2008: Finarea are having problems with their verification service not recognizing the PIN number they give you for CCs and Paypal. Their only suggestion is to "pay some other way", which may be difficult.
Also if you have used paypal with them it may be difficult to set up a new account as they now check if your paypal address has been used on a different account and refuse the payment.
The latest offering, 12voip, has a better range of free countries than voip*, but reduces the freedays to 90. If you pay via paypal you may though be unable to move to them for the reason above.

1 Sep 2006: credit doesn't expire anymore. After 120 "freedays" you pay 1 cent/min for the "free" destinations. Buy more credits to regain free calling.

On May 10, 2006 the policy has changed AGAIN: now the limit on free calls is defined as "Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days"
(Check the fineprint at the bottom of the respective rates pages.)


ALWAYS check carefully with the sites which destinations are free (within the limitations mentioned above) and which are not. For a quick, possibly automated check from a shell prompt, run (maybe as a cron job) this "listfreedest" script:

#!/bin/sh

case _"$1" in
_)
       echo "usage: $(basename $0) finarea_service"
       echo " (e.g.: \"$(basename $0) voipdiscount.com\" )"
       exit 1
       ;;
*)
       lynx -dump http://www.$1/en/calling-rates.html \
       | sed -n "s/[[:space:]]*\([^)]\+[)]\).*[Ff][Rr][Ee][Ee].*[Ff][Rr][Ee][Ee].*/  \1/p"        
       ;; 
esac

See VoIPBuster's page for another rate checking script.

Caller ID with Asterisk

Some Finarea offerings provide the ability to set your outgoing Caller ID. To do this you need the Windows application supplied by that provider (voipcheap.com, smslisto.com etc). You can enter up to five numbers as your own. In the settings these numbers are listed with a Register button next to them. If you press the Register button, the application will display a code number. Then Finarea will ring the number you specified. If you answer and dial in the code given, the number is registered as yours and can be used for Caller ID. Outbound CLID doesn't always work as it depends on the route taken for the call.

To use the number with Asterisk, use something like the following in sip.conf. The first five lines are the important ones for Caller ID:

[smslisto.com]
username=your_user_name_here
secret=your_password_here
fromuser=0044.......  <--your registered number goes here
authuser=your_user_name_here

type=friend
qualify=yes
nat=yes
insecure=very
host=sip.smslisto.com
fromdomain=smslisto.com
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=ulaw&alaw

Usage/credit check by script

The following script, both bash- and ash-compatible, checks either available credits (in eurocents) or free minutes usage for most (all?) Finarea services. It makes certain assumptions about the web interface, so it may break if such interface is changed. The last parameter is optional, and if present it represents the number of months ago to which the free minutes usage refers (1 = last month). For example:

Download it at : http://www.simong.net/finarea/
It requires curl built with SSL support, and returns a status different from zero in case of errors (including login failure).


fincheck creditcents voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD
...prints to stdout the number of eurocents still available;
This now also works correctly with voipbusterpro.(They charge 3.9 cents per "FREE" call)

fincheck usedminutes voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD  
...prints to stdout the free minutes used so far during this month;

fincheck usedminutes voipcheap.com USERNAME PASSWORD 3
...prints to stdout the free minutes used three months ago.

TZ=CET fincheck last7daysminutes voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD
...prints to stdout the free minutes used in the last 7 days (including the current one) using German timezone for day boundaries

TZ=CET fincheck last7daysminutes voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD 5
...does the same, with a 5 day offset (the 7-day period from 12 to 5 days ago). The "TZ=CET" setting makes the script refer to day boundaries based on the timezone of Switzerland and Germany, on which all Finarea/Betamax services appear to base their accounting.

Send SMS (new 2 Oct 2006):
fincheck sms smslisto.com USERNAME PASSWORD "MESSAGE" DESTINATION_NUMBER [SENDER_CALLERID]
Timed SMS send (new 19th Jan 2007):
fincheck sms voipcheap.co.uk USERNAME PASSWORD "MESSAGE" DESTINATION_NUMBER SENDER_CALLERID MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE GMT_DIFFERENCE_IN_HOURS

Make a call - connect two telephone numbers (new 2 Oct 2006):
fincheck call voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD  SOURCE_NUMBER DESTINATION_NUMBER
Source and destination numbers must be in international format ie. 00COUNTRY_CODE etc. OR +COUNTRY_CODE etc.

Added in version of 25th June 2008:
The possibility to send your account balance as a SMS
fincheck smsbalance PROVIDER USERNAME PASSWORD DESTINATION_NUMBER [SENDER_CALLERID]

PHP version:

New version 1.2 18th of July 2007:

Using PHP. Caller-ID can be set on SMSes. Delayed SMSes with correct understanding of GMT.

An example script is included.
Check it out at http://www.simong.net/finarea/

---

2 May 2007 - Revamp of original version
An update of the original script by enzo was moved to http://www.i-t-vision.com/opensource/fincheck.txt due to the difficulty of properly escaping brackets and other special characters for inline publication...

Please note that now the provider's name must include the tld (e.g., "voipcheap" will have to be replaced by "voipcheap.com" or "voipcheap.co.uk", as appropriate).

For administrators of multiple account, there is now a "master script" (findaily) that, invoked by a cron job, calls fincheck for a list of accounts (defined inside the script: look for the lines between "(cat <<-EOF" and "EOF") and produces reports mailed to the individual account holders, plus a synthetic summary to the administrator. This is available at http://www.i-t-vision.com/opensource/findaily.txt, and a typical crontab entry for it to run every day at 8:30 am could be: