Can I have any suggestions on how to make cheap phone calls from the UK to just one land line number in the USA and at what cost.
At the USA end is an elderly lady with no computer or smart phone.
For many years I have used Talk Talk and the itemised call charges were £0.00 up to about an hour and maybe 20p more if over an hour.
My landline has now been switched over to digital and Talk Talk scrapped.
BT's idea of retaining international calls is £18.00 per month or £1.16 per minute.
it is called progress?
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www.rebtel.com/en/rates/unitedstates/
Last edited by: ORB>> on Mon 9 Feb 26 at 18:51
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We speak to our Texas son 3/4 times per week. Cost =Zero
WhatsApp via Broadband when we are at home or at friends when we are connected to their BB
If we are out we still use Whatsapp phone but we never on long.
In the last 15 years I have made 1 mistake 20 seconds and phoned instead of via Whatsapp - £3+ IIRC
He is in Kuala Lumpur for a few days. The plane he was on on Saturday allowed him to access MoTd for free + send & receive WhatsApp
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We ourselves use WhatsApp to call Australia regularly but ovbiously no use here as the recipient had no computer or smart phone however :-
www.lebara.co.uk/en/home.html
Lebara Pay as you go Mobile is interesting, cheap and uses Vodafone in the UK but includes 100 or 500 international calling minutes/month in the packages inc USA. It's also a good sim to roam in Europe/India!! and add-ons to roam in other countries.
Last edited by: BigJohn on Wed 11 Feb 26 at 21:56
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Our son in California videocalls us weekly - sometimes while walking the dog! Progress which would seem miraculous to our not very distant ancestors. It seems to cost nothing, no matter how long the call. But we have had to invest in a 'smart' telephone and pay regularly to maintain an internet connection, as had he. It smacks of the early postal service when the recipient of a letter, not the sender, had to pay for its postage. Anyway, these days both caller and recipient need to pay somehow for this American dominated development.
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It's called "Whatsapp" John, it's free to install and use on your mobile and you can call another user from anywhere in the world for nothing. As for the cost, my Tesco smartphone costs me £7 a month with free calls and texts to UK landlines and has all the other benefits of such a device too. Thirty five years ago I was paying three times that for a BT landline and calls, and that was all you could do with it.
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>> But we have had to invest in a 'smart' telephone
>> and pay regularly to maintain an internet connection,
if you didnt, you wouldnt be on here. Back in the day, you had to pay a shed load of money for a land line, and pay a vast sum for each call by time. Now you can pay £11 a month for a smart phone, and videocall your son for as long as you want for your £11 a month. Its cheaper and its called progress. Dunno why you blame the yanks for making your life easier for less money.
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Got a smartphone? Download MS Teams. Wherever you call in the world , all you pay is the wifi. Do it at home and its pretty much free. Not just voice but video calling.
We use it at work on our company laptops. We dont have desk phones anymore. It means when we have our laptop connected to the net. Wherever we are in the world. Someone calls our number ( Colchester) and we answer . No problems.
As an old guy I continue to be blown away by technological advances in my working life. When I started it was phones on desks, carbon paper to get a copy. A mainframe computer not one PC. And lots and lots of paper. A Xerox machine on another floor. Telex machine , Fax was whizzy new technology, now its antique. Email is ancient, we use the chat feature in Teams...still send emails with pdf's. I'm retiring ( early) this year so Im a bit contemplative but the point stands. Its a whole new world.
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I remember many years ago (I am very old) my boss came to a meeting with something in a little plastic case. He got us to guess what it was, nobody knew, he got this thing out of its case - it was a pocket calculator. Oh! How we marvelled.
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I went on a (technical) training course in the '70s. We were surprised to be issued with brand new calculators (LED Sinclairs IIRC). We were all asking for new batteries by the end of the next day!
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>>We were surprised to be
issued with brand new calculators (LED Sinclairs IIRC). We were all asking for new batteries by the end of the next day!<<
I'm still using a calculator bought from B&Q in 2002, and still have a Japanese barge I bought the same year.
Both the calculator and the car's key fob batteries are still plodding on.
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I've a couple of identical solar powered calculators, different brands but otherwise exactly the same, that date back to 1984.
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Teams (from AI) - "a free personal account for Microsoft Teams does not have the native ability to call landlines or mobile phone numbers" and there is plenty to back that up... Needs business version and phone add-on etc etc. Won't be cheap!! :-)
Last edited by: smokie on Sat 14 Feb 26 at 09:37
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Cheap phone calls to a landline in the USA ? - ORB>>
