International dialing
Both the Scientist and I have mobile phone service and last year we started using a service that costs a mere $10 a month for unlimited national calls and texts. It’s like a steal really. It’s a prepaid service and it’s pretty useful for us when we don’t use all that much data. The only problem with it is there is no voicemail service and that creates a few issues for me, mostly for work. (There’s a service to translate to text but it’s fairly useless.)
There’s a $5 add-on for this service that allows international phone calls to x number of countries and it includes all the usual English speaking western countries and then some others. It even had Sri Lanka on it until quite recently. I usually keep in touch via Skype with family members but evens in late December had me trying to get in touch with family members in the more traditional way and so I got the international add-on.
It all worked really well for the few people I’d tried to call. Then it was my brother’s birthday on the 19th and I decided I’d try to call him. The first hurdles were having the correct phone number. My mom had two and neither was right. She provided the latest number and so I tried the next night and I kept getting a message saying it wasn’t able to connect to that number and to try later. I repeated this with no success and tried again the following day and so on…
It’s not confirmed completely but it seems my brother can’t get international calls on his prepaid plan. I’m not that clue-y on US cellular phone plans but here it doesn’t cost anything to accept calls no matter where they are from. I think this is pretty standard across the board now. But I guess there are still variations on phone services back home.
And now that I know all this it didn’t matter too much since I developed a sore throat a few days ago and now have laryngitis. I couldn’t talk even if I wanted to.
2 Comments
Valerie
Ouch about the laryngitis!! I hope you’re feeling better by now.
Do you have access to Google Voice? I use it to make long distance calls from my landline. It’s free, which is kind of amazing. But I don’t know if it is available everywhere.
The way it works here, I use my computer to go to their website, where I click on a button to make a call, and I type in the phone number that I want to call. Then it makes my home phone ring. I pick that up, and then hear ringing as it connects me to the other person’s number. It is pretty easy. I usually use “Legacy Google Voice” to place calls, because it is a tiny bit easier than using the current interface. Anyway, I have no idea if any of that is useful, but I figured I would type it in, just in case.
Purple Lorikeet
I’ve never tried Google Voice but I have done similar with Skype. In fact I used Skype to call the Scientist when I was last home and it worked okay. I could probably use that to talk to my brother if we timed it well. We could also use Facebook messenger although I don’t think it works as well as Skype.