You may remember that earlier this week we reported that Google was offering free landline calls to the US and Canada via Gmail – but that the service wasn’t yet available to UK customers. It turns out that wasn’t strictly true.

I have my Gmail language settings set to US English, because the company traditionally releases new features to US customers first. Lo and behold, this morning my Gmail was upgraded with Google Voice and it appears there is no geographical IP blocking on the service.

So if you’ve got friends, family or business contacts in the US or Canada, change your language settings and fill your boots – at least until Google notices and cuts the international service off. (It may take a couple of days for the Google Voice to appear, as it’s a staggered rollout.)

If you’ve run out of free minutes on your mobile, you might even want to think about it for making calls to landlines in the UK, which are charged at only $0.02 (a smidgen over a penny) a minute, regardless of time of day. You can see the full list of international rates here.

Google gives you $0.10 worth of credit if you want to check out the call quality.