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Everything You Should
Know About Phone cards, Calling Cards, and Calling Accounts:
Phone
cards, also known as calling
cards and calling accounts,
have become the most economical way to save your hard earned money when calling
International destinations. In
the past, there was only one way to make an international
long distance call and that was by using your phone company’s
long distance service. This
meant very expensive international
long distance rates loaded with fees and followed by a monthly
bill which was often a shocker. Phone
companies then offered “international
long distance plans” that lowered
the international calling rates to more reasonable prices but that
came with a monthly fee to enjoy those rates.
At the same time,
numerous calling
cards were offered in a multitude of places such as small grocery
stores, convenience stores (e.g. 7 Eleven) and mostly, ethnic grocery
stores. Each calling
card claimed to be the best and
the cheapest calling card you can buy but none of them lived up to
such claims. The statement
“best phone card” means
different things to different people, and the statement “cheapest
calling card” was almost impossible to verify due to a
combination of shady terms and undisclosed phone
card fees or calling
surcharges. This
meant that it was impossible to compare various
phone cards in any meaningful way.
Additionally, most of those calling
cards offered decent calling rates to ONE or TWO places while
charging above average calling
rates to the rest of the world.
So unless you call one place, and only one place, you may find
yourself giving back much of the savings you made when calling
one place by paying high rates
calling the other.
The biggest problem
with such calling
cards was the unusually high rate of the issuing Calling
Card Company or International Long
Distance Company “going out of business” or discontinuing the
service for a phone card you just bought.
Many people found themselves left with a $10 or $20 laminated card
that give you nothing but grief for the money you lost.
Tens of such shady ‘fly by night” calling
card companies would come and go in a timeframe of weeks or months
making people wonder whether they were ever legitimate or they were simply
collecting money for phone cards and calling services that they never
intended to support.
As the internet has
become the medium of choice for retail, many calling
card companies moved their activities online.
Instead of getting a physical phone
card that you can hold in your hand, you buy a virtual calling
card (or calling account) where the PIN number is emailed to you.
Such phone cards are called PIN-Based phone
cards.
Calling card companies will offer you toll-free or local
access telephone numbers to access their phone card system.
You will then be asked for your PIN number and that will allow you
to gain access to your calling account.
You are then directed to dial your international long distance
phone number and you are connected. Another
phone card system, an easier system, is the PINLESS calling
card.
This system allows you to register your phone number with the phone
card company (without having to change your local or Long Distance Phone
Company). Once you dial their
access number, the phone card company will sense your phone number
(similar to how Caller ID works) and will give you instant access to your
calling account. No PIN or
access code needed.
Note:
United Globalnet's International Phone Cards offers
the convenience of ONE ACCOUNT that gives you both kinds PIN-Based and PINESS
phone card features. There
are no fees, no surcharges, and no taxes whatsoever.
United
Globalnet's International Calling Cards offer one minute rounding.
United
Globalnet's International Calling Cards
offer a universal card with one rate to each
locale. Instead of buying a
calling card for each country, you buy one calling account and you get the
best rate to each and every country in the world.
United
Globalnet's International Calling Cards is so confident of the
quality of the service that it absorbs the cost of any call made that is
of unsatisfactory quality as long as you terminate the call within the
first minute. You do not have to contact United
Globalnet for a refund. If the call disconnects or you hang up
within the first minute then the call is FREE!
Phone
Card Call Rounding:
An
interesting trick
that some calling cards do is to have rather high increments
for minute rounding. You would expect the calls to have
increments of ONE
minute since you are quoted the rate
per minute but some phone
cards see it differently. While they quote you the calling
rate per minute, the calling
increments can be up to 5 minutes or more! Therefore, if you
are making a quick 30 second call
to your international destination, let's say calling
India, then the cheap
calling rate per minute is irrelevant because you will be paying 5
times that rate! Let's say that the
phone card is quoting you the rate
to call India of 5¢ but that same phone
card is also doing 5 minute rounding. Then, for that quick
30 second call, you will be charged 25¢. You will be paying the
same amount if the calling card
disconnects your call in a few seconds! So not only did your call
get interrupted seconds after you call
India, you are also paying the phone
card's 5 minute calling
rate to India as well. Not a bargain
phone card or a cheap calling
card after all. With that same calling
card, if you talk for 5 minutes and one second, you will be paying
the 10-minute price and you will pay the same if that cheap
calling card disconnected you seconds after your first five
minutes of calling India as
well. So for the example above, using that cheap
phone card to call India will cost you almost twice as much as
what you would have calculated according to their calling
rate to India. You will pay 50¢ for a call
to India that should cost you around 25¢-30¢. Phone
card companies who do this will offer very
low calling rates since they make much of that by rounding your
call up to the nearest 5-minute increment and other
calling tricks as well. Therefore, the
cheapest India phone card may may end up being a lot more
expensive than other India calling
cards with cleaner terms but higher published
calling rates.
Calling
Cards Minute Calculation:
When you purchase
a phone card, you have certain international
destinations that you intend to call at calling
rates that you have looked up. You then figure out an
approximate number of minutes you expect based on your purchased
calling card balance. When you dial
your international destination, the phone
card will often tell you how many minutes
you have for the call. After you start talking, and well
before using the calling
minutes you were expecting, you hear a notification that you only
have one minute remaining! How can that be? Welcome to phone
card minutes that are different than the normal minutes we all
know. Calling
card minutes can be any number of seconds that the phone
card company has set. United
Globalnet calling cards use the normal (and universal)
60-second minutes but not all phone
cards do the same. Some phone
cards set their minute to be 50 seconds, 45 seconds or even lower!
So, when the phone
card says that you have "X" minutes
to call Egypt for example, while setting the minute to be made of
45 seconds, then that phone card
just ate up 25% of your
calling time regardless of where
you call or how long. So, if your Egypt
phone card quotes you 10¢ per minute to call
Cairo, or to call
Egypt anywhere else, while the same phone
card sets its calling minute to be made out of 45 seconds, then the
calling rate for your
call to Egypt just went up by 30%. If you call
Egypt for 10 REAL minutes, that cheap
Egypt phone card counts those 600 seconds as 13.3 minutes. Your cost for this call to
Egypt is not $1 as you would expect but you will find
your calling balance dropping by $1.40 if the calling
card round up to the next minute. If your cheap
Egypt phone card rounds up on 5-minute increments then
that's $1.50 taken from your balance...a 50% increase over the
calling rate you expected. Effectively, your minute rate
to call Egypt is now 15¢ per minute.
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