Using my cell phone is convenient, but expensive for international long distance calling within the States. I call India, Lebanon, and Mexico quite a bit and would love to know an inexpensive way to complete calls from my cellular phone. Any suggestions?
VoiceStream has the most competitive rates. That's about all I know. Otherwise, what about calling cards?
Jane I also do a lot of international calling from my cell. I have an additional calling card that I call first and which I use then to connect to the international places. What is even better is that I have unlimited LD in the US (T-mobile) and I can call my calling cards switching center directly... they then give me a rebate for not using the 800 number... resulting in international rates between 3.5 - 5 cents to Europe... that;s cheap... If you are interested in the company I use check out www.acculinq.com C.
CaliforniaBoy, can you tell me how you use your calling card with your Siemens S40? Do you use your speed dial / address book functions for that? See, I'd like to do it like I do it with my home phone: a) Save calling card number into myspeed dial key #1; b) Save PIN# into speed dial key #2; c) Save destination phone number into speed dial key #3 or address book, whatever. d) Dial #1, wait for prompt for PIN, dial #2, wait for prompt, then dial #3 or select from address book. I don't seem to get that working. Can you help? Thanks and have a nice day! Martin
Direct dial international rates from cell phone companies are simply horrible. Go with a calling card you can get from some grocery store, best rates ever.
Check out www.onesuite.com I started using them to call SE Asia. It's less than 5cents a minute to HK and only 7 cents a minute to Bangkok. THe nice part is that you can call from your cell phone or homephone without entering a pin. You need to register your phone lines on the web page. So when you call from any of your numbers, house or cell, it recognizes it and no need for a pin. I believe other sites have this feature as well. So all I do is dial an access number, then dial the overseas number, directly from my cell phone. It does use minutes though, but Asia daytime is East Coast nights. So using those free night minutes don't matter to me anyway. I recommend checking it out, they list the rates on the page. I found that it matches the grocery store phone cards, but it's more convenient not having a card, checking your account online and not having to have a pin number. Another nice option is that if you use a local access # to dial in instead of the 1-800 #, it actually makes the rate lower. With cell phone plans these days where a minute is a minute, it doesn't make sense to dial a 1-800 # and pay a higher rate in addition to your minutes.