Online Phone Cards Thank God They Exist!

It is not that many years ago that we would pick up the phone, call our friend, relative or loved one on the other side of the world, talked for what seemed like hours, and when we finished the call we were happy.

A few weeks later the phone bill would arrive, you’d open the envelope, see the international call charges, and just about manage to crawl to the phone to call the ambulance before you passed out!!

Then our local 7 Eleven would start stocking phone cards. We’d buy them having no idea of all the charges involved, but we didn’t care, they were much cheaper than dialling direct, although they never seemed to last as long as what was advertised.

Now these days we have the internet with free calls from Pc to Pc with the likes of Yahoo messenger, MSN, Skype, and numerous others. This saves us a bundle compared with the old days. And if the person on the other end didn’t have a PC, no problem we could still use VOIP (Voice Over IP) to contact landlines and mobile phones using Skype, and other services. The charged for this, but it was still cheap, very cheap.

Now we don’t even need a PC for VOIP, some mobile phone services now include Skype as part of the service so we now have mobile phone to mobile phone anywhere on the planet, with most country to country charges being very low.

However certain countries are still very expensive, take the UK-Philippines, using a BT landline would cost you over $0.60/min, using Skype it still costs $0.25/min (it used to be $0.15/min but Skype put the prices up). The reason for these high costs is not Skype’s fault; the countries in question charge a lot for providing the services. Whereas the UK-USA is only $0.03/min.

All is not lost though for people involved with high rates even on VOIP, we now have access to web sites that sell plenty of phone cards, and I have seen prices as low as $0.07c/min for UK-Philippines. Fantastic!

Here are a few of the top selling phone cards:

• Hello From UK
• Starcall
• Royal Mail
• AT&T
• Solaris
• Jupiter
• Continental
• Discovery

All phone card services you get on the internet use VOIP, so quality may not be as good as landline to landline, but if you get a crap line, just call back.

Specific phone cards are better for specific countries, while others are completely global. One thing you need to be aware of when buying online cheap phone cards is that you may have additionalextra charges, so you need to check what they are, but most web sites carry full details of these.

For instance a $20 card may say $0.08/min, but it may have a service charge of $0.99/week, that is they will deduct that amount from your credit each week while the card is live. Some have daily charges of say $0.20/day, others carry no service charge at all.

You may also be charged depending on what connection phone number you use. If you use the free phone number your cost per minute will be slightly higher, if you use the normal number, you will still be charged a local call rate with your normal phone company.

Regardless of these charges, you will find online cheap phone cards are still the cheapest way of contacting those you know in other countries.

Cheap phone cards are available for just about every country across the globr, here are some examples:

Saint Pierre and Miquelon
Seychelles
Singapore
Sri Lanka
Swaziland
Tokelau
Trinidad and Tobago
Ukraine
Uzbekistan
Virgin Islands (British)
Zimbabwe
Afghanistan
Austria
Bangladesh
Bolivia
British Indian Ocean Territory
Cape Verde
Colombia
Luxembourg
Madagascar
Marshall Islands
Monaco
Myanmar
Niue
Norway
Paraguay
Russian Federation
Comoros
Denmark
Dominica
Estonia
French Polynesia
Greece
Guinea-Bissau
Iceland
Italy
Kiribati
Lao People’s Democratic RepublicLiberia}

For further information please visit our web site: Cheap Phone Cards