Tong Family

Now that Connie’s trip to Senegal went off so well, I thought it was a good time to look at our long distance carrier. We’ve been an AT&T customer forever mainly because I’ve been scared about call quality, but playing with these 1010 services has really changed my mind. Everest for instance has been good as has Cognicall. Although I would say 1016868 is cheap but didn’t work well.
In any case, we pay $0.05 weekends and $0.09 weekdays for interstate and $3/month for international just to make sure my parents don’t dial incorrectly as happened last year when we didn’t have a plan. Here are some sites to study that have no minimum monthlies:
* Bettertelephonerates.com. This site seems to show that things can get much better. They have a nice rate calculator that shows the bill drops to $5.37 per month for in-state and interstate. Wow. Don’t know about the quality of these things though, will keep looking for that. The calculator is great, but they don’t tell you how good the service is.
* “Telcompare”:http://www.telcompare.com/. Here’s a site that reviews various carriers. Don’t know if they are legitimate though, they are high in google ranking. They conclude for long distance that the leading carriers are:
# “Capsule”:http://www.telcompare.com/long-distance-rates-capsule.html. A real $0.039 rate and a pretty good network.
# “Cogniphone”:http://www.telcompare.com/long-distance-rates-cogniphone.html. I used this for dial-around service from Canada and it worked super well. The quality was pretty good. Only concern is that this is a penny stock on the Nasdaq, so who knows how long it will be around. Best thing is the intrastate rates in Washington are phenomenal. $0.039 vs. $0.10 that the others charge. I have their $0.069 calling card and also use their similarly inexpensive dial-around service now and the quality is good.
# “Accxx”:http://www.telcompare.com/long-distance-rates-accxx.html. The quality leader, so naturally, their rates are higher. $0.049 as if you care and $0.11 intrastate in Washington. I might get this one, just because of quality, since Connie would be pretty mad if suddently the long distance stuff stopped working.