free and very cheep phone for macintosh

FWD has two phones pre-configured for the Macintosh (XTen and SJPhone) and very well written documentation of how to connect in 5 steps with either a direct internet connection or through a firewall, NAT (i.e. LinkSYS) proxy/router. Once you have a FWD account which works from anywhere in the world by the way (not just Vonage) and is FREE (as in air) you can make SIP VoIP calls to any other SIP phone anywhere in the WORLD for nothing, nada. In order to make calls to a regular POTS (plain old telephone system) phone .....

Your readers should be aware that the Vonage SoftPhone is simply XTen's XLite phone connected to the Vonage VoIP network. In order to use the service you need to be a subscriber of Vonage and you need to pay monthly fees of $12 dollars on top of the normal monthly of $15. In other words around $27 per month. An alternative both in price and in terms of needing to be connected via Vonage is to get the same XTen softphone pre-configured by XTen from FreeWorld Dialup (FWD) instead of Vonage.
  FWD has two phones pre-configured for the Macintosh (XTen and SJPhone) and very well written documentation of how to connect in 5 steps with either a direct internet connection or through a firewall, NAT (i.e. LinkSYS) proxy/router. Once you have a FWD account which works from anywhere in the world by the way (not just Vonage) and is FREE (as in air) you can make SIP VoIP calls to any other SIP phone anywhere in the WORLD for nothing, nada. In order to make calls to a regular POTS (plain old telephone system) phone anywhere in the world you will need a supplier like iConnectHere. iConnectHere can be dialed directly from your FWD account by dialing **334.
  I have been using iConnectHere to call from Portugal, where I live, to Argentina, Brazil and the USA for about 3c per minute. Calls originating from within the USA to numbers in the USA I believe are even cheaper at around 1.1c per minute. iConnectHere has a couple of plans but the one I use does not require a monthly fee. In other words, I pay what I use and if I don't use it for a month I don't pay.
  So, using FreeWorld Dialup and iConnectHere will give you the same service as Vonage (actually better because of the Vonage codec restrictions plus FWD gives you voicemail and Conferencing, etc for free) and allow those who do not have a Vonage subscription (and can't get one) to use VoIP and connect to [public telephone networks] from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world for much less!