Free International Phone Calls

The Basics:
Ringing Romania, calling Canada or dialling Denmark no longer needs to cost a fortune. There's a stark warning here though, be lazy and pick up your home phone to make the call and you may as well make the trip.

"The cost of calling Paris with BT is 28p a minute, call for more than 5 hours and you may as well travel on the Eurostar."

However it is possible to drastically cut the cost of calling abroad and make massive savings. Huge bulky cables have been laid under the world’s seas to transmit internet and commercial data, as voice calls take limited space they’re used to fill up any excess capacity and specialist providers, known as bucket carriers, tap this supply and sell it to you. These companies work by providing a freephone number (or a short four digit prefix number) to be called from your home phone which connects you to their network and then you dial the number you’re calling.

Bucket call providers tend to underbuy to ensure profitability, which can leads to connection problems. Bigger telecoms companies, like BT, can’t risk their customers, especially business customers, being unable to connect, so they overbuy, increasing prices. Call quality with bucket providers, though adequate, is slightly lower than BT as bucket providers piggyback phone signals on top of data calls. However the biggest reason BT can charge large is customer apathy, as it’s always too easy just to pick up the phone in your home regardless of cost.

Choosing a provider:
Bucket carrier prices vary widely depending on the country called and whether it’s to a landline or mobile, but almost invariably they're they tend to be substantially cheaper than BT. Finessing the very cheapest price is difficult, but there’s a sneaky way to find out what’s a good deal. The Talk Box is a special unit costing you buy that plugs into your home line, it monitors the cost of roughly 15 other phone providers and then matches their cheapest price for each specific call including international calls. However for just the odd call abroad, rather than buying this box, check Talk’s website to find it’s charge for each country so you know what a good price is. Even better, ask for some of Talk’s printed marketing leaflets, these detail which of the companies it monitors is cheapest for each destination. It won’t be the very cheapest, but it gets you close.

Growing in popularity is a different type of bucket carrier such as Just Dial. Here instead of setting up an account the number called is an 0870 national rate number. Once this has been dialled, you can simply call one of around 20 countries without any further charge. The cost is simply the cost of the national rate call billed on your home phone. This sounds great but actually it isn’t always the cheapest. For example use it to call the USA daytime via a BT phone and you’ll pay 8p a minute, however standard bucket provider Breathe has charged as little as 2p a minute to call the USA. However call Chile in the Evening using a phone on the BT Together discount package and it’s just 2p a minute, compared to 14p with the next cheapest bucket provider or £1.10 with BT straight. You can call from your mobile too, so if you’ve unlimited or free national rate calls, you won’t pay at all.

As a rule of thumb, if you're calling a common destination like the USA, Australia, Canada or a Western European country the standard bucket carriers will be cheaper most of the time. However for some more rare countries the 0870 operators come into their own.

The Savings: The savings to be made can be huge. By ringing around 18 providers to find a range of prices the savings were enormous. Call India five minutes each week and you’d pay BT £312 over a year, but with One Tel it’s just £83, a saving of around £230. Call each of Australia, India, Jamaica, Sweden and the USA for five minutes each week and BT will charge you £777 whereas with the cheapest providers it’s just £154. That’s over 80% cheaper saving you £633.