What companies provide PC-to-Phone services in Australia without going
via USA?  I am based in Australia and want to make calls to numbers in
Australia with the delay that using the USA based companies
introduces...

In the first two minutes I understood your frustration with this
search. It really is amazing how many of these companies say they are
based in Australia, and their servers are in New Jersey or San
Francisco. Wow.

Due the hour limit I have, I was able to find two for you. 

The first one I found is www.Oztralia.com. I did a whois and ping
search to verify that they are actually in Australia here's the whois
on them:

Registrant:
Knowledge By Design Pty Ltd (OZTRALIA6-DOM)
   Suite 201. 683 George St.
   Sydney, NSW 2000
   AU

   Domain Name: OZTRALIA.COM

   Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
      Hostmaster  (KB207-ORG)           hostmaster@OZTELL.COM
      OZtell Pty Ltd
      Suite 201, 683 George Street
      Sydney, NSW 2000
      AUSTRALIA
      +61 2 9217 6000
      Fax- +61 2 9212 5727

http://www.oztralia.com/telephone/services.htm


Ozzie Voice is second, I checked their whois information as well, but
unless you ask for clarification I don't think printing it all in here
will be of much interest to you. They are in Bunbury.

http://www.ozzienet.net/voice/products.asp?ID=41


I hope this helps you out. 

webadept-ga

thanks for the prompt reply.  i will check them out.

Dear Questioner,

Well your concept of "being delayed if bypassing through US servers"
is logically very sound (offcourse any thing todo with Autralian phone
network would be better off in Australia) but when we talk about
things on the web we have to keep in mind that a lot of various things
make up the end result. In most cases we have seen that thinking
location wise fails.

The reason behind this is that PC 2 Phone service requires bandwidth
and a good network as well as hardware capabilities and if a company
based with servers in the USA have a lot more of the both in
comparison with any company based in Australia they are much better
off then the one in Australia.

In the US bandwidth and hosting charges are far lower for enterprise
clusters then in Australia, a reason why you are not able to find many
companies actaully operating in Australia.

Well I hope you are able to find some real good PC 2 Phone serive.
Just remember location does not matter much.

I have played with a number of large USA based web-to-phone services
and they all seem to give unsatisfactory results for calling local
numbers in Australia.  The latency introduced by the AUS-US-AUS and
back again across the Internet makes these services pretty much
unusable.  They work ok for calls from AUS to US, but not for local
calls.  You also end up paying for a 'Long Distance' USA to AUS call
which is more expensive than just picking up the phone....