Cheap international calls from SA?

donna1987

hi everyone.
my other halfs family live in south africa so we use the International CallChecker to find out the cheapest access code prices whenever we call and it saves us a fortune. (thanks martin!:money: )
the problem is we are going over to visit them at christmas and i would obviously still want to call my family to say merry xmas! its just calls to the UK from south africa are almost four times what BT would charge us so i dont want to run up a huge bill for my in-laws.
does anybody know of a similar sort of thing(ie access codes) that work when calling from South Africa to the UK?
also im sure that my mum in law would appreciate it as she has almost all of her kids over here now and she has to wait for them to call her cos its too expensive for her.
any information would be greatly appreciated as i have searched google high and low and cant find anything that doesnt require up-front payment or a monthly fee.
thank you!

cirrus18

Sorry but I don't know of any cheap way of telephoning the UK from South Africa but have you considered using Skype which is totally free computer to computer. Presuming that that is that your relations have computers. https://www.skype.com/download/

My brother-in-law lives in the Eastern Cape, Sedgefield, and has a dial-up connection, my connection is broadband. We have long conversations together at weekends when he only has to pay a small dial-up fee to stay connected to the Internet for the whole weekend.

The reception is amazingly good, with the sound quality as good as a normal telephone. The only problem I have found so far is that there is often a delay when speaking which seems to vary from time to time. Nothing to put one off once you get used to it and after all it is free!!

NiteRider

I also have family in SA and they told me that they just do not have the same choices for phone providers

I have Skype now but when we were in SA last year what I did was make a quick call home then asked my mother to phone back (from my house) using Call 18185 (or whatever was cheapest at the time.

Sounds simplistic, I know, but just an idea. Would mean a minimal charge for your in-laws and U could pay for a longer chat.

Enjoy your trip. Will be hot in SA at Christmas.

NiteRider

A detail, but I actually meant to put the smiley face after the message. Don't use the icons often. Shows, doesn't it?

MissBehaving

There is only one telephone provider in South Africa at the moment, Telkom, and they have the monopoly.
When we are there we make an agreement with my mum and dad (who are in Wales) that they will call us on a certain number at a certain time of day.

We also used to give my mum a 'scots ring' (I think thats what its called) where you ring and put down, then ring again.... that way she knew it was us and phoned us back.

We put money in my mums bank account before we leave for our holidays.

Heinz

MissBehaving wrote:

We put money in my mums bank account before we leave for our holidays.

I trust you'd also set her up with a 18185 account (2p/minute UK to S.Africa)!

redux

also look into callback services, which set up the two legs of the call as incoming calls independent of local providers' tariffs

some are set up bt calling a trigger number; others are set up over the internet, or wap or sms triggers from a mobile