Hi all,

I found an interesting offer and I wonder if it could be interesting for those who travel a lot abroad.

Major characteristics of the offer I found :

- You receive free calls in the countries listed

- Calls you make are from € 0,50 to € 0,33 a minute

- No monthly fee

- You get a new simm card that you slide into your phone

- With that simm card, your phone has a new cell number

You will need a phone that accepts simm cards, and the phone has to be simm-lock free. T-mobile and AT&T provide phones that accept simm cards. Then you'll have to make the phone simm-lock free, but there are a number of companies who can do that for you for $50 or less (do a Google-search and you'll find them).

The calls you make may sound expensive, but the € 0,50 to € 0,33 a minute is for international calls. In additon, I would compare that to the rate that most hotels charge you when you make calls from your hotel-room, but also to the rate you have if you use your US phone abroad.

You can check http://technos.nl/international_sim_card.html for an overview of the countries and more information.

Thought you'd all like to know ...

Sincerely, Anton/Amstedam.

ps: I'll be travelling the US in June, July and August. For those who'd like to know more, check the "Business class" section.

Thanks for the link Anton. I appreciate it.

I have used Vonage for years. I do this as they don't pull my IP and base my outgoing or incoming calls on where I am located. This means I can travel anywhere and still get all my calls for my monthly fee. I have the world plan and it covers most places I travel. It is not free but I find it worth it.

I have used Skype in the past and enjoyed it. But, they have gotten much more expensive and they do look at your IP. I have unlimited US and Canada calls per month but if I am outside of the USA, they count that as long distance and charge me for each minute. This really sucks as I am out of the USA more than I am in USA.

I haven't really tried other plans but I still use both of the above but mostly Vonage. The Vonage adaptor is also 110-220 so it plugs in fine in most countries and I can set up a regular phone with it and it works perfectly.

Hi Oz,

You're right that Skype got clearly more expensive suddenly.

I used to be very enthousiastica about Skype, I also had their "call unlimited" plan, but they also introduced 4 cents for the start of each call unexpectedly. What annoyed me most is that they made that change very silently.

So I searched for alternatives and I found Gizmo. For those who haven't heard of Gizmo yet, if you compare prices for calling to landlines, then at first glance Gizmo seems to have the same rates as Skype.

However ... Skype charges me € 0.020 a minutes for calls to the US, while Gizmo charges me $ 0.019 to the US. Please note that the first amount is in euros, while the second is in dollars ...

And as I said, Skype also has a start-rate of 4 cents.

I noticed other things with Gizmo that I really liked:

- Voice mails can go to your jouw email box

- You can record calls with a mouse-click

- A free 775 area-code number

- Loudspeaker and microphone volume can easily be adjusted.

- Their quality is better than Skype's (very important)

LOL, this feels as if I'm making advertising for Gizmo, but my main drive is that I got upset with Skype. :-) (because they raised their prices so silently.)

Warmest to all, Anton/Amsterdam.

mobile : +31 6 4II7 3343

website : http://www.gayescortamsterdam.com/