Hi I am in Australia and my husband is in the US. It looks like it may be a long long time before we are able to be together as our visa process is not going well and our only form of communication is via the phone (he doesnt have a computer) The phone bills are draining what little money we have left and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good internet phone company. I have seen some advertise for as little as 1c per minute but this seems a little too good to be true. Does anyone out there use the computer to call an OS phone and if so which are the best providers? Also, are there any downfalls to net phoning vs a standard phonecall? Any help with this would be very very much appreciated...our phonecalls to eachother are all we have right now.

Hi I am in Australia and my husband is in the US. It looks like it may be a long long time before we are able to be together as our visa process is not going well and our only form of communication is via the phone (he doesnt have a computer) The phone bills are draining what little money we have left and I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good internet phone company. I have seen some advertise for as little as 1c per minute but this seems a little too good to be true. Does anyone out there use the computer to call an OS phone and if so which are the best providers? Also, are there any downfalls to net phoning vs a standard phonecall? Any help with this would be very very much appreciated...our phonecalls to eachother are all we have right now. Dekkie and I tried netphoning at one point but were unable to get it to work because the headset hardware that is most effective at getting clean lines (made by Logitech) does not work in Australia.  We actually bought it, thinking it was a minor tweak to get it to work - but it wasn't.   So we just ended up using regular phone providers. BUT....I know that Dekka had a plan with Telstra where the calls were like $6 AU for all calls up to 1.5 hours.  In other words, whether the call lasted 5 minutes or 90, it was that really really low price.  In contrast, stateside, I had the cheapest normal international calling plan that I could find, with Sprint at $0.13/minute (went up to $0.14 recently).  More often than not, we let Dekkie do the calling on the expectation that I'd send him a check occasionally to pay my share. Hope this helps.

I live in the UK, and I pay about 3 pence a minute to the U.S. which is really good. For your husband, recommend him this website for calling cards: http://www.nobelcom.com My fiancee who lives in the states, buys these cards all the time. I guess even if your the only one with a computer you could buy them on his behalf then let him know the details. Can I just say I would highly recommend that he buy a PC, even if second hand. Messenger programs and Email don't require anything more powerful than a 200mhz system, which would cost nothing if not people would be throwing away.... so get him to look around. Whatever you do don't use Telstra for calls, they are rip off merchants. I will ask my bro's in Australia who there low cost international provider is and get back to you. I think world exchange or something like that, i'm not 100% sure. No need to be sorry about *my* situation - my man is home now.  You must mean the OP's I was going to recommend that he get a computer because frankly with access to real time communication in the end he'll come out a lot better.  But if he's not going to, I don't think he should rule out the flat-rate Telstra plan, if you don't want to muck about with calling cards with all their hidden charges and the like.  Dekka will be able to say for sure, since he was on the Telstra plan while he was in Oz, but neither of us felt that the costs were at all unreasonable

Hi Amber, sorry about your situation. I live in the UK, and I pay about 3 pence a minute to the U.S. which is really good. So good rates are out there, you just got to do a bit of research to find them. For your husband, recommend him this website for calling cards: http://www.nobelcom.com My fiancee who lives in the states, buys these cards all the time. I guess even if your the only one with a computer you could buy them on his behalf then let him know the details. Can I just say I would highly recommend that he buy a PC, even if second hand. Messenger programs and Email don't require anything more powerful than a 200mhz system, which would cost nothing if not people would be throwing away.... so get him to look around. Whatever you do don't use Telstra for calls, they are rip off merchants. I will ask my bro's in Australia who there low cost international provider is and get back to you. I think world exchange or something like that, i'm not 100% sure.

3 pence a minute from UK to USA...where? Im in the UK, better half in the US. The best i could find was approx. 7pence a minute to the US, but fiance found one in the US for 3cents a min to the UK so we went with that. As for not having a computer, I couldnt begin to put a value on having access to email, messenger programs and boards like this one, it has made the whole process so much easier and easily the best investment I ever made.