International Phone Card for 10 cents a minute

My jaws dropped when my friend spent more than $1000 worth in phone bills in a single month. I remembered when we went on an immersion programme to Germany a few years ago, I bought a $20 phone card and only called home 3 times in the entire one month I was there and the card ran out of value, while my friend brought her handphone along, and was always on the phone with her boyfriend. I did not know how she managed to pay off that shocking phone bill, but there must have been a cheaper way around this.

I could have applied for a local calling card, something I was familiar with because one of the part time jobs after my A Levels was to run a hotline for this particular campaign. However, my vague memory of that was that it was still rather expensive because it had a two tiered programme, and the upper tiered programme cost more in order to get cheaper rates to more countries. As for the lower tiered programme, it only allowed calls to another country from Singapore, or from that country back to Singapore, and not between multiple countries.

With the advent of globalisation, people will be calling everyone from different places. One phone card online, Pingo, allows calls to many countries. According to the website, a call from Singapore to Malaysia only costs S$0.111, so for many Malaysians who work in Singapore, or Singaporeans who love to go over to JB for seafood or shopping, it is probably cheaper than using our local telcos to call. They even have great rates to India, so I guess this will come in very useful for some of us in Singapore.

Some people think that messaging is cheaper calling, but they are wrong. The foreign telcos charge exorbitant rates, so I guess using a prepaid calling card is so much better. They only charge a minimal sum of US$0.98 a month, so I guess the great savings will more than make up for my quarterly trips overseas. The last time my mother went to China and called back using one of our local telcom special number, she was charged doubly. That was ridiculous. If I had known about this service with competitive charges earlier, my mother could have save up to 90% on her mobile phone charges.

Special offer: When you sign up for Pingo, you will get US$8 in free calls. There will be up to 5 hours of free International calls for signing up with them. A US$25 phone card will cost you US$17 only.

P.S. If you use this special phone card blog discount coupon: “ppp3”, you get $3 off Pingo.

This post is brought to you by Pingo.