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.

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

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.php Ver 1.2 18th of July 2007. See below:

New version of fincheck 28th of January 2008. See below:

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(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.

(20 Feb 2007)
On 15/16 Feb 2007 all Betamax services were out of action due to a fire at their server centre. Service was restored the following day.

NOTE: 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.)

(1 sept 2006)

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

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\" )"
        exit 1
        ;;
*)
        lynx -dump http://www.$1.com/en/rates.html \
        | sed -n "s/[[:space:]]*\([^)]\+[)]\).*[Ff]ree.*[Ff]ree.*/  \1/p"
        ;;
esac

---

2006-11-03 Update:
Since some pages are using CAPS for the FREE / Free or free word, you need to modify the script to looks like:

---

1. !/bin/sh

case _"$1" in
_)
       echo "usage: $(basename $0) finarea_service"
       echo " (e.g.: \"$(basename $0) voipdiscount\" )"
       exit 1
       ;;

• )

       lynx -dump http://www.$1.com/en/rates.html \
       | sed -n "s/[:space:]]*\(^)\+)\).*[Ff][Rr][Er][Ee]*.*[Ff][Rr][Er][Er]*.*/  \1/p"
       ;;
esac

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Usage/credit check

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:

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 voipstunt 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.

2 October 2006:

Added : Send SMS and Make Call

fincheck sms voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD "MESSAGE" DESTINATION_NUMBER

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.

Ver 28th of January 2008:

Download it at : http://www.simong.net/finarea/fincheck

Added : The possibility to count free sms-es in last 7 days. (last7dayssms)

fincheck sms voipstunt USERNAME PASSWORD "MESSAGE" DESTINATION_NUMBER MONTH DAY HOUR MINUTE GMT_DIFFERENCE

It requires curl built with SSL support, and returns a status different from zero in case of errors (including login failure).

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/

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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:



3 Jul 2007 - fincheck updated to cope with missing newlines before each <tr> in the HTML tables returned by the servers for the call record details