Calling family overseas – why’s it so expensive?

Understandable that you queried using a landline, but many younger people may be in rented accommodation and many contracts for landlines are for 12 months minimum (some are longer if you add broadband).

If you have unlimited internet on your mobile, and the ability to “tether” your tablet or laptop, then a fixed line is less important perhaps for someone young and single… all their friends call their mobile or text them etc…

As to the mobile networks etc, I think they are starting to try to differentiate themselves with the Three PAYG dropping the cost to 3p/min for calling landlines (01/02/03) and mobiles, or bundling lots of minutes etc, but the lowest prices for calls are usually to the most popular destinations, and not on xenophobic grounds, as you point out 🙂

“What about using your landline?”
I was with BT and am now with Virgin Media – I have family in Chile and charges on both of these are totally outrageous. I use 2 US-based carriers:
Voxofon http://voxofon.com/
and
Keep Calling http://www.keepcalling.com
They both provide UK geographic numbers which means calls are included in minutes on a mobile package or “free calls” on landlines.
Keep Calling is slightly cheaper but Voxofon allows you to assign a number to each of your regular contacts, so you can have them on speed dial.
I started with 10 USD dollars paid into each one and it seems to last for ever!

“The British xenophobic approach of unreasonably surcharging for anything foreign”. Excuse me? While it is anachronistic for international calls to be charged at high rates, this is hardly unique to the UK – in South Africa, it’s also more expensive to call a local mobile than a US one.

When some people in the US and elsewhere in North America give out their phone numbers, they don’t include the international prefix because they assume you know they’re ‘number one’. The irony is that it is still cheaper to call the UK from the US using an international prefix than it is to phone Bermuda or Jamaica, which use the ‘domestic’ prefix.

Thank you I will try this, next time I’m in the UK?

Hi Matt, You say u dail 08 and what?, you wait, or do you have to rejester, with some one?, Only I have not heard of this b4,,, What I do is buy a phone card, from the shop’s, you ask them, they ask you what country, for £5, you can get up to 450min’s, that’s what I do to phone Thailand, You have to ask, if there is a daly charge, as some card’s take money off of the card?, so do check? [comment edited by moderator]

Various companies offer these “access numbers”, and here’s the information off one of the web sites: Now that you have your cheap call access number it’s as easy as 1,2,3

1) Dial the JustCall access number for the country you want to call.
2) When prompted dial 00 then the country code (31) then the number you want to call.
3) You will be connected.

I just searched for “cheap calls to USA” and a few sites were listed, namely Planet Numbers, Cherry Call, JustCall.

So as Matt said, he dials an 08xx (in my example above it was an 0844 number, to be able to call a Dutch mobile for 5p/minute) and then at the prompt, dials 0031

You ask how they make money – they use one of the 084x or 0871 numbers where the company receiving the call gets a part of the call cost. They get paid for all the time you are connected. Since they buy in bulk (tens of millions of minutes a year) they pay very low per-minute rates, but they also get paid for time when your call never gets through… while you hear the foreign number “ringing”, but not being answered, you are still paying 5p a minute.

I think the big problem for Harriet (whose sister is abroad) is that she is using a mobile, and that makes even an 0844 number far more costly to dial. Of course the other problem is that her sister’s mobile and tariff don’t allow for fancy solutions like Voice over IP, Skype, etc

re expensive to closest vs cheaper to some remote countries…

Probably based on volume of calls. Larger the volume, the lower the charge as the oceanic cable firms will give discounts for buying in the millions of minutes…

Although we are part of the EU, the EU has quite a number of languages. I suspect if you look again at the destinations, many have a Commonwealth link, or are English speaking, and conversations may be longer as a result of that familiarity… So calls to Australia, NZ, Singapore, HK, Canada, USA, are often among the cheapest, while Scandinavia, Greece, and east into the Middle East (and past Soviet Republics) and south across Africa, are not in such high demand.

It’s got nothing to do with language or geography, or even demand. It’s to do with how much phone companies in various countries charge their counterparts in the UK – the rule of thumb is that the smaller or the poorer the country, the more expensive it is. The US and Canada charge the same for a call to a mobile phone as to a landline, as do Hong Kong and Singapore, but in other countries there’s often a big difference in price between calling a landline and calling a mobile. Anyway, now that there are large numbers of people from Poland and other Eastern European countries in the UK, there is demand for lower call rates to those countries.