Guide · Updated October 6, 2026

How to Call a Landline From the Internet (5 Methods That Actually Ring It)

By the ChromePing team

Why some internet calls can reach a landline and others never will

A landline is not on the internet. It is a pair of wires, or these days a fibre box, that ends at a telephone company switch. WhatsApp, FaceTime, Signal and Telegram calls never leave the internet: they connect one app to another app, which is why they are free and why they cannot make a kitchen phone ring. WhatsApp’s own help pages describe a voice call as calling your contacts from a chat over your internet connection, and Apple’s requirements say the person you FaceTime must be signed in to FaceTime. A landline cannot sign in to anything.

To ring it, your call has to leave the internet through a gateway into the phone network, and from there it travels as an ordinary call that the receiving telephone company meters by the minute. Somebody pays for that leg every time. That is the whole economics of internet calling to a landline in one sentence: when a route is paid, you are paying for the gateway; when it is free, someone else is paying — your carrier, Google, an advertiser — and they put limits on it.

It also means the landline’s side of the call is completely ordinary. Nobody there installs anything, nobody needs internet, and a thirty-year-old rotary phone works as well as a new cordless one.

Two questions sort the five routes: who answers at the other end, a person or an automated menu, and what their phone displays when you call. Keep both in mind as you read.

Method 1: Wi-Fi calling on the phone you already have

If you have a mobile phone with a plan, you may already own an internet route to any landline: your carrier’s Wi-Fi Calling setting. Switch it on and your normal phone line travels over Wi-Fi instead of the cellular network. You dial from the same keypad, the landline sees your own number, and because it is your phone’s own dialer, its keypad behaves as it does on any call.

The catch is that it is still your plan. The three big US carriers say much the same on their support pages. Wi-Fi calls to US numbers carry no extra fee, even from abroad; on a T-Mobile plan without unlimited minutes they count against your allowance. Calls to numbers in other countries are billed as international calls at your plan’s rate, or at pay-per-use rates if you have no add-on, and those are steep: Verizon lists $1.99 a minute to the UK and 69¢ to Mexico without a plan; AT&T lists $4.00 and $2.00. You also need a phone and plan that support the feature. Verizon says iPhones have to switch it on while connected to its network in the US — it can’t be turned on after you leave the country — and AT&T lists thirteen countries where it cannot be used at all, including China, India, Turkey and the UAE.

This route mostly lives on your phone, so it answers “how do I call a landline from my cellphone” rather than the laptop question. Apple does let an iPad or Mac make Wi-Fi calls on your iPhone’s number on AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, and T-Mobile offers a web client for postpaid customers, but both are extensions of your phone plan rather than a way around it. If what you have is a laptop and no phone at all, that is a different route, covered in our post on calling from a laptop without a phone.

Method 2: Google Voice (US accounts only)

Google Voice is the free route that genuinely reaches landlines, with two conditions that rule most of the world out. The personal version is only available in the US, and it needs a personal Gmail account plus a phone number of your own to link at setup. Once you have a Google Voice number you can call from voice.google.com in Chrome, Firefox, Edge or Safari with nothing to install. Google says almost all calls to US and Canada numbers are free when you call from the US; a few specific numbers cost 1¢ a minute.

Calls to other countries use prepaid credit at Google’s per-destination rates, and the credit has rules. Your balance can’t exceed $70, minutes are billed in one-minute increments, and unused credit expires six months after you last used it. Google may also reclaim a number that sits idle for about three months. If you travel, Google warns that calling might not be available where you are and that calls you make from abroad are charged international rates.

Calls placed from voice.google.com go out from your Google Voice number, so that is what the landline’s display shows, and anyone can ring it back; on a computer that only works while voice.google.com is open in a tab. It can’t make emergency calls — Google says to use your device’s phone app for that.

Method 3: Teams Phone or Zoom Phone, if your work pays for them

Microsoft Teams and Zoom both have a phone product that dials real numbers, and both are add-ons to a paid business subscription rather than something you sign up for at home. Teams Phone is a separate licence that your organization’s admin buys on top of a business Microsoft 365 plan, and it needs a calling plan or another phone connection before anyone can dial out. Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go plan includes no outgoing minutes at all — every outbound minute is metered, and nobody can dial out until the plan is funded. Teams Free, the personal version, cannot buy calling at all; the only phone calls it places are for people still spending leftover Skype Credit. Zoom Phone needs a Pro, Business or Enterprise Zoom account plus a phone licence. Zoom’s pricing page lists a US and Canada unlimited plan at $16 per user a month billed annually, with international calls metered on top, and its site says metered plans start from $10.

If your employer already pays for one of these, use it: you get a work number, an office-grade phone system, and calling landlines is what it was built for. If you don’t, it is the wrong thing to buy for calling your aunt — you’d be paying for a phone system to make one call. Google Meet can also ring a phone into a video meeting on paid accounts such as Google Workspace, but that adds a phone to a meeting rather than placing a call.

Method 4: Free ad-supported calling sites

Search for “call landline from internet free” and you’ll find PopTox, Globfone, CitrusTel, Call2Friends and similar: type a number into an ad-covered web page and the call goes out (Globfone makes you watch an ad first to earn the credit). They really do reach landlines, and PopTox and CitrusTel still ask for no signup. The strings are specific, and they are on the sites’ own pages:

• Caps. PopTox lets you call the same number up to five times a day for free. Call2Friends allows one or two free calls a day per internet connection, each around 90 to 120 seconds, and says its free calls use lower-quality routes than paid ones. Globfone hands out a small daily credit after you watch an ad, enough for a short call of a few minutes and sometimes only seconds to pricier mobile numbers.
• Signup creep. Globfone, which ran for years without registration, now requires an account, an SMS-verified phone number and a payment card on file before you can use the free tier.
• Coverage that moves.Globfone covers selected countries and publishes no fixed list. Call2Friends’ free-destination list is shorter than its homepage suggests and changes without notice — for the US it covers toll-free numbers rather than ordinary lines — so check it before relying on a country. CitrusTel says it works only in Chrome and Opera.
• No callback on the big two.PopTox shows 218-414-1141 on every call and CitrusTel 202-858-5588, so the landline can’t ring you back and on their display it looks like a stranger calling. Call2Friends lets you show your own number once you’ve verified it by SMS code and hold a paid balance; Globfone’s pages don’t say what it shows.

Use them for one short, low-stakes call — “I’ve landed, I’ll call from the hotel.” Not for a conversation, and not from a number you’d want a clinic to see.

Method 5: A pay-as-you-go browser dialer

The fifth route is a web page that behaves like a phone with a wallet: you keep credit or a plan, type a number, and it dials the real phone network. ChromePing is one, and it’s our product, so read this section knowing that. It works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge, on a laptop or in a phone’s browser, with no app and no SIM, and it dials mobile and landline numbers worldwide. The landline rings normally with a real caller ID: a shared ChromePing US number by default, a phone you already own once you’ve confirmed it with a one-time SMS code, or a number you rent from us. Caller ID is display-only — it changes what they see, not what the call costs. The general version of how calling from your computer works is on its own page; this is the landline-specific one.

Rates are per minute by destination and shown before you dial. Straight from our pricing engine: 1.9¢/min to the US and Canada, 5.9¢/min to the UK, 5.0¢/min to Mexico, 5.3¢/min to Colombia, 8.3¢/min to Japan. The other side of the ledger: 11.3¢/min to Germany, 63.8¢/min to Italy and 101.3¢/min to Spain — not a bargain by anyone’s measure. Every country is listed on the live rates page. Billing is the first minute in full, then per second, so a 30-second call costs one minute and a ten-minute call costs exactly ten times the rate. You can pay as you go with $10, $50 or $100 credit packs, or take a monthly plan; the plans, and which lower-rate destinations their included minutes cover, are on the pricing page. Calls to countries outside that list — Spain and Italy included — come out of your credit at the per-minute rate. New accounts can claim 1 free minute by verifying a mobile number. The claim is a one-time SMS check of a non-VoIP mobile from any country, on the free-minute page.

Something none of the credit-calling services offer: optional live two-way translation on the same call. You speak your language, the person on the landline hears theirs, and live captions run in your browser. It adds 10¢ a minute on top of the destination rate and covers a growing set of major languages — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Dutch and Hungarian among them. Captions are live only; there’s no transcript afterwards. “Their voice + captions”, one of three things you can choose to hear in the dialer, keeps the other person’s real voice in your ear and puts the translation underneath as captions. There’s more in our post on translating a phone conversation.

The limits: no touch-tones for press-1 menus today, voice only, incoming calls need a rented US or Canada number and an open tab, and it is not for emergency calls.

The five methods at a glance

How to call a landline from the internet, step by step

Whether you’re calling a landline from a computer, a PC at work, a laptop or a phone, the mechanics are the same five steps, and the first one is the easiest to get wrong.

1. Choose a route that reaches the phone network. App-to-app calls such as WhatsApp or FaceTime connect only to another app. For a landline you need Wi-Fi calling on your phone, Google Voice, a work phone system, a free calling site, or a browser dialer with credit or a plan.
2. Write the number in international format. Begin with a plus sign and the country code (+44 for the UK, +52 for Mexico), then the number without the leading zero many countries use for domestic dialing. On a browser dialer or a free calling site, a number written the way a local dials it usually won’t connect; on your own phone’s dialer, dial as you normally would and add the country code only for another country.
3. Allow the microphone and use a steady connection. On a laptop or in a phone browser the service asks for microphone permission the first time; allow it. A voice call needs far less bandwidth than video, but a weak connection is what makes audio choppy, so stay on good Wi-Fi.
4. Dial, and let it ring like a normal call. The landline rings as it would for any caller. Before you dial, check what your route shows as caller ID if the person needs to recognise you or call you back.
5. Check whether the number answers with a menu, and pick a keypad route if so. Many offices and clinics answer with a press-1 menu that listens for touch-tones. Your own phone’s keypad behaves as it does on any call; some internet routes can’t send the tones, so keep a keypad route ready for those numbers.

What the landline sees: caller ID and calling you back

The second sorting question is what the landline’s display shows, because it decides whether the person recognises you and whether they can call you back. Wi-Fi calling shows your own mobile number, so a callback works as usual. Google Voice calls go out from your Google Voice number, which rings back on a computer only while voice.google.com is open. Teams Phone and Zoom Phone normally show the work number your organization assigned you (admins can change what is displayed), and callbacks ring that work line. PopTox and CitrusTel show their shared numbers (quoted above), so nobody can ring you back; Call2Friends can show your own verified number if you hold a balance.

A browser dialer such as ChromePing offers the three caller-ID options described under Method 5, and whether they can call you back depends on which you show. Show your own mobile and a callback rings that phone as usual. The shared default number isn’t yours, so nobody can reach you through it. For a callback to ring in your browser you need a rented US or Canada number ($2.99 a month from credit) — voice calls only, it rings only while a ChromePing tab is open, no forwarding to a phone, no bringing an old number across. On every route, caller ID is about what’s displayed: it doesn’t change what the call costs, and showing a number doesn’t erase a spam label that number already carries.

What a 10-minute landline call actually costs, by method

Ranges are easy to publish and useless for planning, so here is the same ten-minute call priced per route — from our live rate engine where the route is ours, and from the providers’ own pages where it isn’t.

• Free site:$0 if it fits the site’s limits: Call2Friends stops at about two minutes and Globfone’s daily credit covers only a few, while PopTox caps how many calls you make to a number each day rather than how long they run, and CitrusTel publishes no limit.
• Google Voice:free to US and Canada numbers from the US; abroad it’s Google’s per-destination credit rate, billed per whole minute — Google’s rates page has the figure.
• Wi-Fi calling:whatever your plan charges. To a US number on the big three carriers, nothing extra; to the UK without an international add-on, Verizon’s listed pay-per-use rate works out to $19.90 for ten minutes and AT&T’s to $40.00.
• Teams Phone or Zoom Phone: a per-user monthly licence your employer pays, plus metered international minutes.
• ChromePing: ten minutes to the US or Canada 19¢, the UK 59¢, Mexico 50¢, Japan 83¢; Germany $1.13, Italy $6.38, Spain $10.13. Add 10¢ a minute — $1.00 on a ten-minute call — if you turn on translation. Rates come straight from our pricing engine; the full list is on the rates page.

On ChromePing a country’s landlines and mobiles share one flat rate and billing is per second after the first minute. Carriers and Google mostly round up instead: AT&T says its international rates round up to the nearest minute, and Google Voice bills in one-minute increments.

Which method should you use?

• Your own phone and plan are with you, and the landline is in a country your plan covers? Wi-Fi calling. Your number shows, your keypad is there, and it may cost nothing extra.
• In the US, with a US Google account, calling US or Canada landlines? Google Voice.
• Your employer pays for Teams Phone or Zoom Phone? Use it. Don’t buy it for personal calls.
• One short, low-stakes call, and you don’t care what the display shows? A free site.
• Regular calls to real numbers abroad, from a laptop or a borrowed computer, no app, with a number they can recognise? A pay-as-you-go browser dialer. That’s ours; how calling from your computer works is covered above, and the rate for the country you have in mind is on the rates page.
• The number answers with a menu?A route with a keypad — your phone’s own dialer, not ChromePing.
• You came here because Skype used to do this? Skype was retired on May 5, 2025, and the last Skype Numbers ended in May 2026 with port-outs closed. Our post on what replaced Skype for international calls walks through the replacements one by one.