iPhone 3GS Accessories

on the phone - photo by mil8 @ flickr (cc)

Calling abroad on a mobile phone, be it back home when on holiday or out to an overseas friend, used to be the basis of many a mini financial disaster.  Indeed, such was the scale of the problem that the European Union felt compelled to intervene through legislation.  The crux of the matter for many disgruntled mobile users was the way that call charges changed when ‘roaming’ abroad.

‘Roaming’ means connecting to one of the local mobile networks in the country you are visiting to make a phone call, rather than through the usual route of connecting to the domestic network back home.  Charges for routing mobile phone calls through alternative networks vary wildly, and the problem for many has been the fact that the overall cost of making calls is not always easy to establish.  Once people got used to the idea that making an international call while abroad was costly, many still fell foul of the charges involved in receiving a call.

The E.U. has now capped the cost of receiving calls while abroad to 15p per minute.  While this is a step in the right direction, the cost of making international calls on a mobile is still a cause for concern for many.

One way to try and save money on international calls is to simply avoid making them.  Text messages also attract roaming charges, but at least these are fixed per message.  Through use of shortened ‘text speak’, and the expenditure of a little time when composing a message, it can be possible to preclude the need to make many international calls.

However, there are some occasions that really demand a phone call rather than a series of text messages.  This is where looking at the way your phone can connect to different foreign networks becomes important if you are to keep the cost of calls reasonable.  Thanks to the expansion and increasing specialisation of the mobile phone industry, there is now a possible solution in the form of the specialist international calls SIM card provided by operators like Lebara.  These pre-paid sim cards usually beat the rates offered for international calls by standard domestic mobile networks, and can also provide a means of making international calls from the U.K. to specified countries.