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July 9, 2005 6:41 PM

Call to/from EuropeFilter. I'll be traveling quite a bit in the near future and need a way to call the US of A.

I have T-Mobile for my cell provider and they charge 99cents a minute to call the U.S. from Europe. I'm shooting for less than 10 cents a minute. Is that possible? I don't mind a calling card, but I'd like to have it before I leave for Barcelona next week. Any thoughts?

posted by pencroft to Travel & Transportation (10 answers total)

I doubt there's a Europe-wide solution.

In the UK I'd just buy a pre-pay card from a corner shop and use it on a landline. You should get 1 penny/minute to the states like that. I assume the same thing exists across Europe. Translatlantic bandwidth's so cheap that there are companies like www.pennyphone.co.uk where you just pay the cost of a non-geographic local call.

You could investigate buying pay-as-you-go SIMs and putting them in your (unlocked, triband) phone, but you'd have to buy a new SIM for each country, and I don't think the saving's that great (99p/minute on Vodafone's PAYG service - more than you'd pay while roaming).
posted by Leon at 7:25 PM on July 9, 2005

pencroft, I wish you luck. I found absolutely no way at all to make cheap calls from Spain.

Maybe a pre-pay card that is a local call from a public phone?

I never found one. I spent so much damn money on phone calls there. Goddamned Spanish public phones. If I think about it anymore I will become enraged.

Good Luck.
posted by redteam at 10:38 PM on July 9, 2005

US phone companies (or, for that matter, ones from any other country will take your business I suppose) do have global solutions where you can call from a local access number in each country but they don't tend to be that cheap since they are aimed at the business traveller. Is it just Spain that you are going to? I had a card like that once but then again, my mother was paying for the calls...

I guess that the only other option is googling for local cheap operators in each country. We have a lot of them here in the UK - for a while, I was able to call the US for 1 UK penny a minute, now it is like 2 pence. But I suppose the market is much more developed here.

But if it is Spain that you are most concerned about, I hope you find an ex-pat that's been there for a while, they are bound to know the best ways to do that. Good luck.
posted by keijo at 11:00 PM on July 9, 2005

I found cheap pre-paid phone cards (for land lines) in Barcelona in Internet/Fax/Long-Distance Call shops targeting the local immigrant populations. These shops are everywhere and despite sometimes looking slightly shady, the workers were always friendly. The cards were specialized for North America and were around your price target (in Euro cents).
posted by Staggering Jack at 11:45 PM on July 9, 2005

Well Riiing is a much better deal for your mobile at EUR 0.39/min.

Here's international origination calls back to the U.S.. Expensive! (Although still less than EUR 0.39/min). These services will mainly be useful if you're in a country for a very short period of time and don't want to spend 5 of the local currency units on a prepaid phonecard, or don't have time to do so. I've used AccuLinq before (the cheapest way to call the UK from the U.S. last time I checked) and have been very happy.

The cheapest thing is most likely to be a prepaid calling card bought in the country you're going to. In the UK you can find these even cheaper online.
posted by grouse at 2:00 AM on July 10, 2005

I mean "Here's international origination calls back to the U.S. from the Abtolls comparison service."
posted by grouse at 3:48 AM on July 10, 2005

Yes, buying a phone card from a local internet/phonecard store seems to be the cheapest way -- you are looking for a store with a window display of posters for various phone cards, which list dozens of countries (often in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East) with associated rates. The card you want will be about the size and heft of a playing card, and will have a local phone number and PIN on the back; call the local number from a payphone, key in the PIN, and you're in. You do not want the kind of hard plastic card that you insert in the payphone; these will work but will probably run you a euro per minute or so.

I've bought cards of this kind in the UK, France, and Germany, and in my experience they have always been reliable and extremely cheap; the advantage over an internet offer is that you're not giving an unknown entity the right to charge calls to your credit card.
posted by escabeche at 8:18 AM on July 10, 2005

Skype
posted by blue_beetle at 12:38 PM on July 10, 2005

I was impressed with NobelCom, which I used for some US to Canada calls. What's nice about them is that it's cheap, it immediately gives you an ID number you can use (there's no physical card), and you get to pick which "penalty" the card uses (i.e. a per-week fee or a per-call fee).

(I do get spam from them occassionally, though, so you might want to use a throw-away e-mail address.)
posted by Sibrax at 3:11 PM on July 10, 2005

Just got back from London (just in time). The whole time I was there I used this company -- they're dirt cheap and I never had any trouble at all.
posted by JPowers at 3:35 PM on July 10, 2005