Being a Filipino, with many friends and relatives in the Philippines, I sometimes need to call someone in the Philippines to their landline of mobile phone. And in some cases, the person I need to contact may not be near a computer or may not even know how to use the computer well like my mother. So I am going to exclude talking about Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, MSN/Live/Windows Messenger and others.
Now based in San Diego, California, Every now and then, I receive a random call from a telemarketer promoting some service to call the Philippines saying they have an extremely low rate to call the Philippines. Cheapest than most overseas long distance calls.
Not being rude and also being open-minded to listen to the various options I may have to call the Philippines, I often entertain these people and I just always ask the bottomline. How much? And not a single time has any one of these telemarketers matched the prices of what I was currently paying to call the Philippines
And to share what I have been using and why, I am sharing my review in comparing several companies that you can use to call the Philippines.
- Directoph
- Skype
- PinOnSale
- Vonage
- Packet8
See who wins the review! Download the comparison table document here.
If you find this helpful and you know people that need to call the Philippines, or if you are in the Philippines and have relatives abroad that need to call you, feel free to pass this blog post to them so we all get to save some money and use the money to save for more important things like sending money to the Philippines.
November 18th, 2008 at 12:29 am
Hi, very good article about cheap ways to call the Philippines. This will surely help someone especially Filipinos to save on calls.
BTW, Yahoo Messenger is actually capable of calling a landline or mobile number around the world. You just need to subscribe to Yahoo Voice to be able to make calls to a regular phones. Rates varies from one country to another. Yahoo Voice rates to Philippines is 15.9 cents for landlines and 19.9 cents for mobile phones. I have used it before and it works.
You may also add Onesuite.com to the picture. It’s a prepaid long distance calling card service with voip feature so its a prepaid phone card with Skype like features but cheaper. I use it to call the Philippines and vice versa. Rates are 12.5 cents for landline and 16.5 cents for mobile. Calling a U.S. number through its voip feature is only 2.5 cents per minute.