Long Distance options

[dreamshark]

Is there anybody on my friends list who still makes long distance calls from their land line? If so, what long distance service do you use/recommend?
Currently I have a very out-of-date landline/DSL package from Qwest which I plan to redo completely. I currently have some sort of LD service bundled in with the landline. I intend to drop all packages and special services and revert to just basic phone service PLUS the fastest DSL available on my phone line.

We don't make enough LD calls to justify paying a monthly fee. I seem to remember that there used to be some services where you just dialed a string of digits and got a pay-as-you-go long distance service. Are any of those still around?

Oh, yeah - the service I'm looking for should include international calling.

Comments

[laurel]

We use calling cards or cell phones whenever we need to make a long distance call (which isn't often). I know some folks use Skype successfully for that sort of thing.

We don't have long distance service on our land line at all; have to use calling cards if we want to use it for that purpose.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Any calling card that you particularly recommend?

[quadong.livejournal.com]

We make long distance calls from our land line. I'm afraid that my comments won't be very helpful to you though. Our average number of calls per month is about one, with the average call length under an hour. Usually we have the person on the other end with the free-long-distance cell phone call us instead. The set of people who we *ever* call long distance is, I believe: my parents, my grandmother, Kelly's father, Kelly's sister.

We have Qwest's long distance plan that is the cheapest per month and the most expensive per minute. I think they are $2.00 and $0.15 respectively, but that might be a bit off. We (Well, I, really) chose this one because I did the math and found that with the number of minutes we use, it's about the same as the higher per month, lower per minute plan, but this way gives us a higher incentive to get the person at the other end to call us back for free, so it's probably cheaper in the end.

It does include international calling, but it's very expensive. I think that a 3 minute please-call-me-back call to my parents in France was $5 or so. I have no idea if that's $1.60/minute or if there's a large connection fee. Either way, I don't plan to use it again unless its an emergency.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

Our long distance usage is a lot like yours. I chose the Qwest plan with the larger monthly fee but lower minutes, which was stupid. Mostly we just get charged $7.23 per month for NOTHING. So I'm planning to drop it completely, probably go with a calling card.

And I made that horrible discovery about the international calls accidentally. I'll bit it wasn't a 3-minute call that you got charged $5 for - it was probably 30 seconds.