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Travel Cards at 9.9¢/minute

When you are away from home, making a telephone call can be difficult. The available options are ...

1. Cellular phone: they work well when you are near a cell tower. They are a great convenience, but the monthly charges are high.
2. Pay phones: Plunking coins into the machine will get your call through, if you have the coins. Since cell phones are so common, pay phones are disappearing, so they are becoming hard to find. Making a call on them is expensive if you use the long distance service they provide.
3. Prepaid calling cards: If you purchase one of the cards through our web site (www.protel-com.com/prepaidcards.htm), you can get a great deal. But there are distinct disadvantages to many pre-paid cards: billing is normally in one minute increments (or longer), some have connection fees, there is frequently a "monthly maintenance" fee, they may have an expiration date, so that if you have not used up all the minutes, you lose them. You also tie up cash in the phone card and if you lose the card the money is lost also. You have to decide which is best for your circumstances and for what purpose you are using them. Examine the choices we provide here.
4. Travel cards (Post-paid calling cards): You pay for the call made on a travel card after you have made it, receiving the bill when you get home. Most cards have a "bong" charge ("bong" being the sound of coins entering a pay phone) of 75¢ or more added to the per minute cost of the call. Some companies have a monthly fee to carry the card in your wallet, or when there is no fee, charge excessive per minutes rates to use the card. Travel cards suffer from the same problem as pay phones and prepaid cards: you may have to find a working pay phone. But a travel card can be used on any phone, even a borrowed cellular phone, not just a phone with a card reader.
5. Toll-free numbers: It is possible to make calls to people you call frequently (your wife from the office, your son away at college, your parents, your ISP connection from remote locations) even cheaper by using toll free numbers.

Why use our Travel Card?

1. We have no service charge to use the card. (We do charge an FCC mandated fee of 65¢ to make a call from a pay phone; every toll free number and card call made from a pay phone will have a similar charge, regardless of the company. This provides an income to the pay phone operator for the privilege of using his phone. If you use a personal phone at your friend's home or business to make a travel card call, there is no added fee.)
2. We charge only 9.9¢ a minute for making the call from any phone in the continental U.S. to any other phone in the continental U.S., whether across the street or across the nation. In many states that is cheaper than making a land-line call within the state!
3. We bill in six second increments after an 18 second minimum. If you connect to the other phone, you would pay a minimum of 68¢ if you called from a pay phone or 3¢ if you called from personal phone. If you talked for one and a half minutes, your cost would be 15¢ (or 80¢ from a pay phone)
4. Our travel card is free of any fixed monthly charges
5. The cards are generic so that your PIN is not listed on the card and if lost cannot be used by anyone else.
6. Our travel card is a stand-alone product; it can be yours without signing up for our economical long distance service
7. I personally like the card because it is paper thin and does not make your wallet significantly fatter.

What other companies charge

It's interesting browsing the web to check the rates of our competitors. SBC has a 75¢ surcharge each time you use the calling card (in addition to the pay phone charge) and charges 35¢/minute to use the card. A four minute, one second call from a residential phone would cost you $2.50 (0.75 + (5 min. × $0.35) with SBC + the taxes. Our call would cost you 41¢ + the taxes (4.1 min. × $0.099).

International calls

PowerNet Global's free calling card can be used to make international calls. Before you make the call, you should compare the rate using PowerOne or PowerDial service versus the cost to call the same country if you use the PNG Travel Card

Page revised June 27, 2004.

Copyright © 2003 Eugene Volz   All Rights Reserved