Phone Cards

After my experience with WinTel, a service which provided me with inexpensive long-distance service until they started charging me a monthly access fee totally out of the blue, I found myself once again facing Telus Mobility long-distance charges, and even the spectre of not being able to make calls to Germany at all from my phone. It's a cell phone, and by default they are not able to make overseas calls, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense until you happen to leave your phone somewhere and someone unscrupulous picks it up.

I called Telus Mobility to have my phone activated for overseas calling. The customer agent was intelligent (and honest) enough to tell me what I should look for is a calling card, and after she explained where I could find one, I didn't have to get my phone switched over after all.

This being 2006, there is now a whole industry relating to calling cards with byzantine rules and rate schedules. In fact, the card I bought allows me to use two different plans from the same company using the same PIN--the card features a hybrid of two plans called Liberty and Premier Plus. For about 4 cents a minute, I can call Germany. (When I had a long-distance relationship with someone 200 km away in 1998, I was paying several times that, and by the time I moved in with her, I was broke!) Thank you, Internet!

Odds are very good that this will all be obsolete by the time you read this, but if you are interested in making long distance calls for reasonable prices from any phone, have a look here.

After the headache of figuring out what a phone call was actually going to cost, I called my aunt to tell her how much progress I was making with my trip preparations. It was very nice to speak to her for 16 minutes, and all for 67 cents. The world gets smaller!