ET would love this! (International Call Charges in general)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	International Call Charges in general
Date:	23/08/01 (1580 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheaper than BT

Disadvantages: Some Pre-pay cards have limited lifespans, Hard to find

How many of you out there make foreign phone calls on a semi regular basis? Are you fed up with the amount of money that your normal phone provider is charging? I would imagine that if you stuck your hand up for the first question, then it should follow that you’re nodding away at the answer to the second question.

Well, hopefully I have a solution, at least for those of you who make personal foreign phone calls (as opposed to business foreign phone calls, which I assume may be a totally different proposition). Lots of students are already aware of what I’m going to tell you, and it’s really quite easy.

There are companies out there that offer cheap rates for phoning abroad. When I say cheap, I mean really cheap. The last time I checked, it was something like 45p per minute to phone New Zealand using a standard British Telecom tariff i.e. without Friends and Family etc.

I can think of three companies offhand who do this: Onetel, Alpha Telecom and Swiftcall. Onetel have been around for a while, and they were the first I’d heard of as a friend of mine who was going around the world a few years ago had a Onetel card which he used to phone home. Alpha Telecom is getting some exposure now due to a seemingly large television advertising campaign, and if you watch Sky Digital, you can’t miss their adverts. The last one, you might not be familiar with – Swiftcall are an Irish based calling company, but I’m sure you can get their cards and accounts elsewhere in the UK.

I’m not familiar with Alpha telecom, and I’m not really sure what state Onetel are in these days – they seemed to have a spot of trouble not so long ago, so I’ll tell you about Swiftcall, but I’ll add references to the other companies where necessary.

As you may have guessed from what I’ve said above, I phone New Zealand fairly regularly. A friend of mine has been living there for the last
few years, and in order to keep things personal, I try to phone about once per month. Now, it only costs her NZ$7.50 for an unlimited phone call to the UK (roughly £3) and when she phones me, we do talk a lot! Unfortunately, when I phone her, it’s usually a snatched conversation because of the restrictive cost of BT’s international charges.

Last September, I phoned her one morning, and we chatted for about 2 hours. At the time I thought nothing of it, but it turned out that that single phone call had cost me £45. Yep, you heard me, £45. So, upon picking myself up off the floor, and paying BT their blood money, I set about trying to find a cheaper way to phone Auckland.

My first thought was Onetel because my friend had used them with great success. I read a few opinions here on Dooyoo and saw both good and bad opinions of the company. Surfing their web site www.onetel.co.uk I was very pleased to see the prices they were charging – much cheaper than BT! (I shall show a price comparison at the end of the opinion to give you a rough idea of the savings involved.) However, did have one problem – they did not do pre-paid call cards. They only offered a residential account, or a “roaming” card that was paid by credit card. As I’m not in charge of our phone account here, that option was out, and as I didn’t have a credit card, well, that option was out as well. I also found their site to be quite awkward to surf – it was very confusing due to the amount of deals etc. they were offering.

At that time, I could find any other similar schemes, so I ended up borrowing my friends roaming card (well, card details) for a few months until I got myself sorted.

A few months ago, while walking around the university area of Belfast, I saw a shop advertising “Swiftcall” cards and the price list on display was comparable to what I remembered the Onetel price list was, so I took a note of
the web site (www.swiftcall.co.uk/uk/index.html) and trundled off to look. Immediately, I was more impressed with the Swiftcall set up. They have a number of different calling cards, and they also do residential accounts as well.

Their pre-paid card works like this: you buy a card for a set amount of money (£5, £10 or £20) just like a mobile top up card. You scratch off the panel to reveal a unique number. Dial the given number (usually an 0800 number), wait for the message, enter your unique PIN, wait for the message then dial the international number of your choice. It’s really quite easy, and this should be very similar to any other pre-paid card from another company. Once your credit is finished, you throw the card away.

Now, there’s no point in me going into minute detail of Swiftcall and the services they offer – that’s a whole opinion by itself, but suffice to say that they offer practically everything you need to make cheaper international calls. Their web site is set out a lot better – it’s a lot less cluttered, and practically any information you need regarding their services can be found here.

I’ve taken a quick look at the Alpha Telecom web site (www.alphatelecom.co.uk) to see how it (and their services) ranks alongside the other two companies. First of all, it’s a lot less cluttered than the Onetel site, and similar to the Swiftcall site. Getting to the section on pre-paid cards is simplicity itself, but this is where things are let down slightly. The other two sites at least have a page of rates so you can get a rough idea of how much you’re paying, but Alpha simply state “We review our rates daily.” So I’ll have to leave them out of my price comparison later.

As you can see, three companies that provide cheaper international calls than BT, and all the information is available on their web sites. If you are wondering exactly how much you save by
using these companies, then take a look at these sample prices. It’s worth noting that, depending on which card you use from these companies, you might get a slightly different rate e.g. a £20 Swiftcall “Swifty” card currently comes with an extra £5 credit, and to some countries has a slightly cheaper tariff than other cards Swiftcall offer.

Country BT Onetel Swiftcall

Australia 49p 4p 4p
New Zealand 49p 4p 4p
USA 24p 3p 5p
Hong Kong 49p 7p 4p
South Africa 79p 14p 16p
Canada 24p 4p 5p

I assume that the companies quote their lowest tariff, so you might not exactly these rates, but they’ll not be that much more than the quoted amount i.e. an extra 1p per minute or something. So you see, if you make foreign phone calls fairly regularly, the savings do mount up!

I can only see one disadvantage of the pre-pay calling cards, and this might only apply to the Swiftcall ones which I use. That is, they have a limited lifespan of only a few months. My current one lasts for 90 days, and even with a fairly extensive phone call every few weeks, I’ll probably lose a few pounds worth of credit.

So, there you go – a few ways to reduce your international phone bill. There are more ways out there that don’t involve cards, but rather proper phone accounts and if you are the phone bill payer, then you can sign up to these if you like. For those of us not in charge of the phone bill, these calling cards are a godsend.

Summary: