Saturday, February 12, 2005
Telephones
Some of you might know me to be a bit of a phone geek. In an attempt to enhance that reputation, I've been making plans for staying in touch while we're in China. Making direct-dial international calls from hotels is often extortionate: a friend of mine made a 30-second call to England from a hotel room in San Francisco, and the hotel charged him $26, which is more than 1000x what I pay to call England using my OneSuite calling card (2.2c/minute).
So I think I can do better than that. Here are the options:
- I will take my GSM phone with me. However, roaming from the USA to China costs about $3/minute for incoming or outgoing calls, so this is for emergencies only.
- I am considering buying a prepaid GSM SIM in China which will work in my cellphone with a rate of 60c/minute to call the US, and about 17c/minute for incoming calls. If I do this I will have a Chinese phone number which I will post here.
- I have signed up for a calling card service that I can use in China for about 59c/minute. This service also has a callback option for even lower rates, about 15c/minute, if I can find a phone that I can receive calls on directly rather than through the hotel operator.
- I will take my laptop and will check email as often as I can get connected. I have also signed up for Skype which allows me to make phone calls over the internet, sometimes referred to as "voice over IP" or VoIP. If I can get an internet connection this will enable me to call any phone in the USA or UK for about 2c/minute. (I can also call other Skype users for free, but I don't know anyone else who uses it. Please post a comment if you do.)
- You can call us at the hotels in Shanghai, Nanchang and Guangzhou. See the links in the previous post for hotel details. If you don't speak Chinese it will help if you know the room number, which I will try to post here as soon as we know it for each hotel.
- I will try to check the answering machine at home regularly. I will also check my office voicemail and cellphone voicemail from time to time. Yes, I know, it's sad, isn't it.
If you try to call us, please bear in mind the time difference. When it is noon in the UK it is 8pm the same evening in China (8 hours ahead). When it is noon in Chicago it is 2am the following night in China (14 hours ahead, or 10 hours behind plus 1 day ahead if that was too easy to understand). And if it's Tuesday this must be Belgium.
So I think I've covered every option for making phone calls. Now, if only I had something interesting to say...
