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The world has become smaller with the Internet, and calling cards too. A few years back, we would have had to place long distance calls with an operator, and then wait for the call to come through. Sometimes it would have been nerve racking, all those minutes of tense waiting. But today, all one needs to do is buy prepaid calling cards. They can be used for international purposes. The connectivity is extremely fast, and the voice can also be heard like as if they are in the next room.
I really don’t like my answer to questions like this, but it’s the truth. You will most likely be charged more for using your global phone card from a payphone outside the USA. The part of my answer I don’t like is that it’sa vague statement, and I like to be as specific as I can with our customers. However, there are a few factors that prevent me from being more specific.
I think it’s most helpful to understand how phone cards work from pay phones in the USA first.
The FCC (Federal Comminications Commission) is an agency in the United States government that regulates different communications throughout the country (i.e. radio, television, telephones, satellites, wires, phone cards, etc.). They have a regulation in place for using phone cards from pay phones in the USA, a per call surcharge will come off the balance of your phone card. This surcharge is then paid from the phone card provider to the pay phone provider for the use of their telephone equipment to place the call. So if you have a phone card with a $1.00 pay phone surcharge, $1.00 will come off the balance of your phone card for every call you place with that card from a USA pay phone.
So that’s how it works in the USA. Outside the USA, though, it’s a different story.
Most other countries do not regulate their pay phones like the USA does. In most cases, the carriers are allowed to do what they’d like when a phone card is used from their pay phones. Usually, one of the following happens:
- A per minute surcharge may be applied to the call lowering the available number of minutes with your phone card.
- A per call surcharge may be applied to the call lowering the available number of minutes with your phone card.
- They could block the phone card all together.
Unfortunately, we aren’t able to say which pay phone carriers in which countries are going to follow what practices and at what cost. It could be different from country to country and carrier to carrier.
The advice I can give you is this:
- If you’ve found a pay phone that’s blocking your phone card, try a different bank of pay phones. It’s likely that the second set of pay
phones is through a different carrier who may not block phone cards.
- The per minute or per call surcharges are usually very high, sometimes triple or quadruple the rate per minute or more.
I’m sorry I can’t give you any more specifics about what this may cost, but this is about the best I can do. Any time we hear of a customer having trouble calling from certain destination, we’ll list the feedback with the access number(s) for that calling card and that country.
For more information about using phone cards while traveling abroad, click here.
