Debbie calls her daughter in South Africa regularly, and she has been using Skype, which is 8p/min, but her daughter’s laptop has finally packed up, and to call a mobile phone costs 13p/min (about 20cents in the US). OUCH!
We found a great calling card today while searching around, the IDT Gold Card, and this has lowered the cost of her calls to 7.67p/min, which is practically half price!
The card is practically perfect – you can register your home/mobile phone so you just have to enter their access number and it will recognize your account (Pinless Dialling), and it rounds up every minute too, so if you go a few seconds over a minute when calling, you don’t get charged for another 3 minutes like some cards.
Best of all there is no additional charge when you make a call (unless from a payphone), no maintenance fee, and having purchased the card it stays active for a whole year after the purchase date or the date that you recharged it.
I looked at their cards, and the rates are really good. If you make any international phone calls, even just a few times a year, this ought to save you a fair amount of money.
They have a variety of rates and cards for calling from and to most countries in the world as far as I can see.