3.2 Calling Home When all of you are far away from home, you may miss your homes, your family, and your girlfriend/boyfriend. One way to reduce your homesickness and probably make you smile is to call someone. This article concentrates on calling from the US to Thailand using phone cards and using many international telephone services provided US phone companies. 1. Calling Card Calls Calling to Thailand using phone cards is by far the cheapest way. Cheap calls are possible by using pre-paid phone cards, sometimes referred to as calling cards. A pre-paid phone card is a phone card that you have to buy it first and then you can use it to make a call. The amount of money in the card will decrease each time you make a call. By using high quality phone cards (as claimed in the advertisements) with their cheap rates to Thailand, you can enjoy relatively good quality calls and save a lot of money. You can call Bangkok for as low as 10* cents per minute or even cheaper for those who live in California (by dialing to a local phone number instead of a toll free number like 1-800), us. The calling rates are getting cheaper and cheaper each day because of competition among phone card service providers. For Thailand call rates, buying phone cards and finding other information, please visit the websites below. They have some of the best rates for Thailand.
These websites sell many phone cards on the Internet. The $20 and $25 values are the most common phone cards purchased. Many of these cards can be used from the US to call almost any country with low rates as well. You are recommended to have a credit card at hand to buy phone cards from them to make the purchasing process fast. However, you can use a personal check or a US money order but it will take more than a week before the PIN (Personal Identification Number) for the card to arrive since you have to mail your personal check or money order to the company. After you have sent them the money, they will email you a PIN and some of them can give you the PIN at once. Buying a phone card on the Internet will not get the card itself but only the PIN. The card itself is just a card, right? Making a call 1. Dial 011, the international access code. Making a call using a phone card** 1. Dial to a given toll-free number or a local access number. * Note on rates: **Note on making calls: 2. Calling from your home phone (with an international plan) There are various telephone companies such as AT&T, MCI, and Sprint that offer you an international plan to make calls throughout the world. Once you have signed up, it will be very easy to make a call to anywhere; pick up the phone and dial. The connection is definitely good both in quality and easiness. However, you will have to pay much more than using a phone card. The calling rates are as high as three times the rates of the phone card. They often give the rates for all places in Thailand. For example MCI's rate is 37 cents for calling to cell phones, Bangkok and other provinces. Moreover, you have to pay the taxes too (as much as 15%). Plans from all companies have monthly fees of about $3 to $5 as well. Note: 1. Now there are some companies that offer you an instant call from your home phone. You do not have to apply for an international calling plan like the ones described above. Just dial a company number, e.g. 10-10-811 and your destination, and the companies will automatically charge you the calling services and taxes. 3.2.1 Telephone Plans Here is the background, to my understanding, of how the telephone systems in the US work. There is a local telephone company, who owns the telephone lines in the area. In the bay area, Pacific Bell (1-800-310-BELL) is the one. You will have to pay a local toll fee to this company. There is another group of telephone companies, which are "Long distance carriers", such as AT&T (1-800-222-0300), MCI, Worldcom (1-800-727-5555), Sprint (1-888-633-7714), etc. These are the companies that give you long distance and international call services, not the local telephone company. Call Pacific Bell once you have the address of your apartment and know your move-in date to order a local telephone service. In the US, local telephone service is offered in a flat-rated plan, in other words, with unlimited calls. Per call service plan is also available but it is not worth it unless you make very few calls each month (<$20?). Ask a customer representative for more details. Generally, a local telephone service is about $10-20 a month. However, with Pacific Bell, as a student with low income, you can ask for a Universal Life Line plan, which you will pay only $5-6 a month for unlimited calls. For long distance telephone service, call one of your favorite long distance carriers and ask a customer representative for a long distance telephone plan. It usually costs about 5-7 cents/minute with about a $5 monthly fee. You can also ask the representative for an international service plan. It usually costs 40-50 cents/minute with approximately a $10 monthly fee. But you have a choice of using some cheap calling cards to call home. It is less than 10 cents/minute. Nonetheless, keep in mind that the quality and the ease of connections are different (See the Calling Home section). In the US, "long distance" means anywhere inside the country but outside the local area. This does not include "international" call. And the word "local" does not necessarily mean within the same area code. For example, calling San Francisco (area code 415) from Berkeley (area code 510) is considered to be a local call. However, same area codes do not imply being local. For example, calling Fremont (some thirty miles south of Berkeley with the same area code as Berkeley) from Berkeley is regarded as a "local long distance" call. It is about 5-10 cents/minute (charged by Pacific Bell). However, you do not need to sign up for any special plans to make this kind of call. Welcome to the United States of America. 3.2.2 Cellular telephone plans Major cellular service providers in the bay area are SprintPCS, Verizon, AT&T, and Cingular. In general, you have to pay a certain amount of money each month to get a certain number of minutes that you can talk. Additional minutes are usually rather expensive (can be up to 40 cents/minute). All service providers categorize the service plans into a local plan and a long distance plan. For a local plan, you can make a call within the local area. A local area for cellular phones is usually bigger than a local area of fixed-line telephones. For example, in the bay area, local area covers many area codes, which are 510, 415, 408, etc. For a long distance plan (sometime it is called a nationwide plan), you can call anywhere in the US but you get less minutes in the plan compared to a local plan at the same price. To have an idea of how much it costs to have a cellular phone, here are some reasonable numbers: $100 for a phone, $30 a month for a service plan which includes 200 daytime minutes and 1000 night and weekend minutes. However, in the service providers' websites, they usually do not show their promotion plans. The best way to get round this is to ask around and keep an eye on the TV and newspapers. Or you can just call the companies' customer services and enquire about their promotions. Do not be surprised if the cellular phone services and gadgets here are not as fancy as those in Thailand. One thing about having a cellular phone in the US is that you do not need to pay a lot for the phone itself. With $400, you will get one of the most fancy ones in the market. A pretty decent one is within reach for a $100. With $0, you can still get a reasonable phone from some of the service providers. Keep in mind that, in most of the cases, cell phones bought in the US cannot be used in Thailand and vice versa unless you have a GSM tri-band phone. This is because the two countries use different systems. Even GSM in the US and GSM elsewhere in most parts of the world are different!
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Thai Student Association at the University of California, Berkeley
