Friday, 04 June 2010
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Advice: How To Make International Calls For Cheap?
We all have friends and family who live far away, whether it be across country or across the globe.
Contacting our loved ones can get very expensive though.
How can we still talk to them without spending so much money?
At the Dollarish Advice forum, Patricia@dollarish asks,
I have a lot of friends and family who live overseas. The international calling plans on cells and landlines are crazy though! I usually can talk for only a few minutes, and just talk to them on Facebook the rest of the time.
I like phone calls though because you can actually hear the person, instead of watching text on a screen.
What's the best and cheapest way to contact someone internationally?
Have an answer for Patricia? Reply to her below or head over to the Dollarish Advice forum!
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Comments (6)
I would use a program that has a voice chat feature (pretty much every messenger has it, AIM, MSN, YIM, or the programs that condense them like Trillian or Digsby) or you could use something like Skype.
If you want to be able to call a phone, years ago, when I used to talk to a boyfriend (ex now) who studied in France for a year, I used a cheap calling card service, www.pingo.com. I thought it was really cool because unlike the calling cards you buy at the store, where you have to call the number and then enter in a PIN or something, you create an account online and you can store phone numbers that you'll be calling from, like your house line or cell phone. When you call Pingo's number from one of the numbers you registered on your account, you don't have to enter in any PINs or anything. Anyway, I dunno what the rates are for wherever you're calling, but when I was calling France, it was pretty cheap. I thought I calculated how much it cost per minute incorrectly, but I kept checking and it worked out. It sounds weird, but if I was doing it correctly, it was less than 1 cent per minute.
I have a Google Voice account. If you have one, they say that they offer low rates for international calls (I wouldn't know, though, since I don't make any). Here a list of their rates:
https://www.google.com/voice/rates
If it looks like these are good rates to you, but don't have an account, Google Voice is currently an invite-only service, so you have to submit a request and see if they'll approve it. For me, it only took them two days to approve it, but I know it took longer for some friends (I don't recall how long).
www.google.com/voice
I also would recommend Skype & Google voice, and another option is Magic Jack - it's a little cheaper than Google voice for the countries my family calls to, but a little less flexible. You pay a flat rate to get a jack that plugs into your computer and gives you a land line number, and then you can plug a telephone into that jack and call from it at a fairly low rate per minute for most international calls. But I'd look at the other options first.
Skype. You don't even have to do the video part if you don't have a webcam. It's free.
SKYPE! you can set it up to connect you to landlines and cell phones through YOUR cell phone. just like long distance- a lot cheaper though
For talking on the phone, use Magic Jack, its only 20 bucks for a YEAR! If you wanna do the whole online video chat thing, then skype or msn is great. I use msn even though sometimes it doesnt work :/