Being ET

Or, How To Phone Home :-)

But first, one of the things I love about living in not-SA: decent TV. Tonight, I could, if I wanted, watch 2 solid hours of Friends. What I'm going to watch is 1 hour of Friends, then House, and then Grey's Anatomy. (Aaargh! For some reason, I can't get 5 o Freeview! That means no House, and no Grey's Anatomy! Hmm, maybe I can switch aerials, or unplug the Freeview box...)

One of the things I hate about living with flatmates: not being able to watch what TV I want because they're watching TV (but luckily tonight they're out, so I can watch what I want).

But, back to the main topic: what's the best way to phone home to SA from the UK? There are a bunch of options, and they can be combined in various ways, so let's just rule out some of the obvious ones first: phoning directly (or calling collect) via a payphone, landline, or cellphone is a bad idea and you shouldn't do it. Actually, I haven't even looked at the costs, but it will be way more expensive than the other options.

There are basically three other options that I know of: calling cards, skype, and telediscount.

Calling Cards
There are a whole range of calling cards; I personally use the Post Office cards (backed by Nomi), which cost 6p per minute to SA, with no other costs. The actual Nomi card is cheaper, and rechargeable online, but you have to register your credit card details with them rather than just entering them each time you want to recharge, something I prefer not to do for security reasons.

Calling cards normally have 2 numbers: a toll-free number, and a chargeable number. The toll-free number sometimes costs more, but not on the Post Office card. On my landline, I can only call toll-free numbers, so that's something to take into consideration. On a mobile, you'll generally pay a surcharge for toll-free numbers, whereas phoning a local UK number comes out of your free minutes (or with Vodafone, is included in Stop the Clock).

Skype and Skype Out
Skype is free, but odds are that if you're phoning someone in SA, they're not going to have broadband and skype won't be so free for them if they're on dial-up... plus, the quality isn't going to be that good. Skype out is pretty cheap (just under 4p per minute, I think) and the quality is pretty good, generally. Of course, this means that you'll have to have broadband, and you'll have to have a skype phone, or a headphone/mike combination.

Telediscount
The final option, that I know about, is telediscount. Basically, they charge about 4p per minute, plus the local call charge, but it all gets billed to your local account - so you can't use it if your landline only allows outgoing calls to toll-free numbers, like mine. You can use it from payphones, although you'll probably pay an extra surcharge. You can use it from your mobile, but it's classed as a non-geographical number, so it will probably not come out of your free minutes/call allowance/off peak rate, so it can work out more expensive than you think.

So those are your options - there may be more, but I think they'll probably fall into one of those categories. If you know of some other, cheaper way, please let me know by leaving a comment :-)