Telephony Overseas
After a couple days in Poland, I’ve explored a variety of options when it comes to communication. In the US, we generally use phone cards: call an 800 number from a pay phone and then enter your pin and dial. It’s pretty cheap and effective.
I have one of those phone cards and know the Polish 800 access number — but the priory where we’re staying for Tertio Millennio doesn’t have phones we can use, so we have to go a bit out to a payphone. The catch here is that the Polish telecommunications firm, tp, has disabled 800 numbers from pay phones. So I have to go buy a special card with a chip in it, slide it into a pay phone and then call. Unfortunately, that means that I have to pay about 33 cents a minute to be able to call using my phone card’s 5-8 cents a minute. That’s pretty expensive for voice telecommunications, so I asked some of the Krakow natives what they do instead.
Their answer was Skype, which is Voice over IP telephony software that is all the rage in Europe, because it’s so much cheaper than phone services. For example, to call to the US from Poland using Skype (which requires a computer, internet connection and headset/mic — which the priory does have available for us to use), it only cost me 2 cents a minute. That’s far more reasonable in my opinion. And Skype-to-Skype calls (i.e. calls that don’t go to a landline phone) are entirely free. And for about 11 more months, Skype-to-Landline Phones within the US (from the US) is also free, thanks to Skype having been bought by eBay. I’m not sure why Skype hasn’t caught on in the United States yet, as the quality and ease of use is really great. I know that in my apartment this Fall for law school, I’m not going to bother getting a landline or paying for oldstyle telephone service. I’ll just get internet access and use Skype.