Phone cards and the rip off that they are.

There are times when one needs to talk to people back home in Zimbabwe.Maybe you have a few cows and you want to know how they are doing.You want to keep audit from a distance.Maybe you have old folk and you want to keep in touch.You probably building and want to keep abreast with the progress.This is when you want to make that call.But how costly is it to call home?

BT charges are broken into plans called friends and family,freedom then they have the standard plan.The first two are 8p per minute and the standard plan costs are 95p for day time and 77 at night.The friends and family is a special plan where BT ask their customers to pick where you want to call for special rates.

Virgin Media has two plans that would interest Zimbabweans.One is the standard call rate which is 106.68 pence per minute for a land line.It costs 131.15 pence for calling a Zimbabwean mobile phone.With a special plan called Talk International the calls are significantly lower.It would cost someone with the international plan 8.8p to call the Zimbabwean land line and 33.27p for calling a mobile.
Given these two fixed phone providers one is left wandering if the phone card companies make any sense at all.To get it there is a fee and some special conditions .

Cards are a double whammy if not just a rip off.Some cards do not work at all.Some will cost you £5 claiming a return of 500 minutes when in actual fact it will give you 120 or even 100 minutes effectively.A simple calculation shows that means anything from 1p to 5p per minute.Some have a expensive geographic numbers which phone companies charge exorbitantly.So one's own provider charges for the geographic number .

My advice will always be that one thinks twice before making use of many schemes available for calling home.I am not sure which one is best myself but I surely know that some are complete rip offs.They help not you and I but the guy sitting in some office somewhere in the world;someone whose account is getting very fat.