Calling in, to and from the Irish Republic

December 1, 2007 11:05 AM

Any recommendations re: best value in calling cards, prepaid cards or calling plans while we live in Ireland for the next four months.

We do have a GSM mobile ( unlocked ), an ATT Calling Card (expensive), a land line in the US, no land line in Ireland and (maybe??) broadband in our Irish rental home. Most of our calls in Ireland will be domestic (on the mobile) but we will have regular calls to/from the US, to/from the UK, and a few calls to continental Europe and the Bahamas. In the past years calls to us (on our mobile) were paid by the caller. I assume this will be true. VOIP is not a realistic solution for us. Any suggestions regarding specific calling plans, international/domestic calling cards, or prepaid cards. We are looking for value, reliability and use from multiple calling locations. Thanks

posted by rmhsinc to travel & transportation (4 comments total)

Sounds like the best plan for you might be to get an Irish pay-as-you-go SIM card for your mobile and use Blueface's calling service for mobile phones when you need to make international calls. It's pretty cheap. Blueface is a VoIP provider but the mobile phone bit is not VoIP.

TeleSavers is another option; you can check rates to a particular country from both landlines and mobiles.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:55 PM on December 1, 2007

Pay-as-you-go SIM, plus Skype Out (using some money in a Skype account, you pay €0.02 or something a minute for calls to most of the developed world via the internet), is what I've used all over the place, from Indonesia to Latvia (where I live now). It's a question of changing your phone habits a little, though - perhaps it's now cheaper to send text messages or e-mail than to call, so keep that in mind for non-essential notes you'd like to send back.

I found this site, which seems legit; while I've never tried it out, it's linked to from the Telediscount UK site, which I know friends have used to call me before for next to nothing.
posted by mdonley at 2:44 PM on December 1, 2007

You might want to look into getting a SIM for your mobile when you get to Ireland; depending on the network here (there's only three to speak of) you can get pretty good deals for calls to the UK and the US. Probably wouldn't be worth it if you're making a lot of (long) calls, but it might be something to investigate nonetheless.
posted by macdara at 3:06 PM on December 1, 2007

Blueface, mentioned above, has a plan for €24.99/month which bundles unlimited minutes in Ireland, Australia, NZ, the UK, and the US.

They also do a thousand minutes per month for €19.95.

You'll need a SIP phone or adapter or a laptop/headset/softphone setup. The adapter option has run our home phone for two years with nary a hitch.

Seperately,

In Europe, including Ireland, you will never pay a cent for an incoming call.
posted by genghis at 7:22 PM on December 1, 2007