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.
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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.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Bro nasan ang xlink page mo. Email me?
July 12th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
If you want to find the cheapest calls from the US to the Philippines, I suggest you try using Zenofon telephone service. You pay between 9 to 13 cents a minute, straight from your mobile phone, with no downloads, no special software and you are not tied to your computer. Plus they offer a great commission system with commissions for life on all your recruits, up to 1000 levels away! I would love to read a review on this site for this great service.
December 27th, 2009 at 2:33 am
Hi Michalska.. Ive searched about zenofon and I wanted to try it but I need to be referred by someone whose been a member of zenofon telephone service. Can you please help me about this. I have been searching the net about the different rates to call in the philippines and the cheapest rate ive seen starts 4peso/min. I hope to hear from you soon. Thank you.
December 30th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
Thanks for the information. But I have to say that I think “PinOnSale” i one of the worst calling cards I have ever used. They charge for calls that don’t connect, and many of the calls I tried connected to the wrong number. There customer service is almost non existent. Don’t waste your money on there phone cards.
December 30th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
I would agree and disagree with you BookemD. I have used PinOnSale for quite some time before I started using Google Voice and MagicJack. (Yup not in the list above, I need to update this blog post.) But when I was still a PinOnSale user, true there are bad cards that cannot connect and you get charged, it happened to me also. But I don’t blame PinOnSale. I blame the specific card I bought from PinOnSale. PinOnSale is a reseller of many phone cards, with different rates also. And when I chose a card, I paid more attention to the star rating than the price. Sometimes the cheapest is not always the best. If ever two cards have similar ratings and pricing, I just start testing one of them and if I am not happy with it, then I don’t buy that specific card on PinOnSale and I move on to the next one.
But one observation I had was after buying several times on PinOnSale, you will sometimes get some bonus points and some small denomination cards for free. And often these free ones are the ones that give me the most problems connecting and they end up consuming the minutes in failed connections or connections where the reception is not clear.
April 25th, 2010 at 8:13 am
In response to Cath and anyone who is looking for a Zenofon invite, please use this one: http://www.zenofon.com/?bipbip
Looking forward to hearing your reviews of this service!
May 1st, 2010 at 10:49 am
The cheapest of them all to call Philippines. Visit: http://www.YeheyCall.com $0.01 (1c) per minute.
August 14th, 2010 at 5:24 am
@ Steve Cork: Is yehey call can call the other parts of Philippines? I looked at the website and it said cebu only?