Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 5:15 PM EST

What are the rates to Canada, How do they differ?

We often get questions about Canadian area call phone numbers, or toll free numbers for Canada, or about using a US toll free number to reach a phone in Canada. Below are some clarifications:

- Canadian phone numbers start with +1, just like U.S. numbers do. There are a couple dozen area codes that are Canadian.

- Phone.com cannot port (transfer ownership) Canadian phone numbers into our system at this time. We hope to be able to do so in the future.

- When a Phone.com customer dial out from their Phone.com phone (using the phone adaptor or a business IP Phone) to a Canadian number, or when they forward calls to a Canadian number using a virtual extension, those calls use “included minutes”

- When a caller in Canada calls a Phone.com customer’s toll-free number, there is a surcharge to the Phone.com customer of $0.05/min. The caller in Canada does not pay anything for the call. Customers can block Canadian callers from their control panel if they don’t want to pay those surcharges.

- Canada is the only country (other than the US) that can call US Toll-free-numbers. There are no Canadian toll-free numbers available to purchase.

- When a caller in Canada calls a Phone.com customer’s local (non-toll-free) number, everything works “normally”; there is no surcharge of any kind.

We hope this is helpful. We also posted this in our FAQs.