I've been living in Canmore, Alberta for a few months now and what with settling in and everything I still haven't got around to working out how to call England cheaply.

I used to call here from England with Telediscount and I'm wondering if there's something similar in Canada.

Also it'd be interesting to see what others do. I bet there are so many ways to call cheap!

We buy international calling cards such as Vox which work out cheap if you are not calling mobiles or 08 numbers.

SKYPE!! If your friends and family have it then its FREEEEEEE

But you can get skype credit, and that's pretty cheap. I think about 0.4p a minute to a land line (I set my account up in the uk so it's in £ not $!) Mobiles are slightly more.....about 14p a minute.

We don't have a land line, so skype is all I use to call home.

Steph x

Personally I've gone deaf so can't use the phone, saves a lot of money on calls

I use messenger and webcams a fair bit, the webcam has a mic with good sound quality so i have never worked out why you need the Skype thing, perhaps someone can explain what I am missing here.

We have some deal with Bell for MOH to ring his family and thats it.

I don't have messenger or a web cam! With Skype I can call landlines. We don't have a house phone and I don't want to use my mobile to call home!

Ah, I didnt know you could call landlines with Skype, I thought it wsa just puter to puter.

Messenger is a simple download if you want to use that, its good.

We use Skype to call people back in England. You can call other Skype users (free) or normal phone numbers (landlines are something like 1.2p per minute, mobiles are a little more and you can even SMS mobiles for about 6p a message). Call quality for us is excellent, very occasionally it drops out though. You can also get a Skype-in number in the UK so that people can call you for normal UK rates.

We use Vonage, which is a VOIP system. It costs me about $40 a month plus tax which gives us unlimited free calls to landline (non-08** numbers) in the UK, Italy, France, Spain, and Ireland, as well as unlimited free long-distance calls in North America.

I've needed to make a lot of UK calls from my mobile recently - no complaints about Virgin PAYG ten bucks a month for 10c/min calls combined with PC calling card @ 3.7c a minute. I'm sure I could do cheaper though, will watch this thread with interest!

We use Vonage as well, and pay a little extra a month to retain a Birmingham local number - means that OH's family can call a number local to them, which reroutes it to us in Canada at no extra cost.

Skype give you unlimited free calls to 36 countries for $9.95 a month and a local number for friends/family to call you on costs $30 a year (with a subscription, or $60 a year on its own).

We have a Swansea number for the same reason.

We have the Shaw TV/Internet/Phone bundle that gives us international calls for 4 cents/minute, which seems pretty reasonable to me. Then again, we don't make an awful lot of calls to the UK - maybe one a week.

We have Shaw bundle.....tv/phone/internet and pay $150.10 per month, this includes 1000 mins per month free. (I mainly call Spain/UK, tv is the basic cable bundle not digital.)

Linda

We used to use skype but found the quality a bit dodgy and I didn't like calling from the computer. Now use webcalldirect so I use the computer to log in but then talk on the 'real' phone. We pay 10 euros flat rate and then if using the computer and a headset (husband) it is free for a call but using the phone (me) it is 5euro cents a call which really is not that expensive. You can stay chatting for ages and it only costs 5 cents for the whole call.