Published: Wednesday, Oct. 20, 2004
Need help making that call? This column offers guidance to users of
From January through July, my wife was employed overseas near Paris.
We wanted to keep in touch and for a time, we made do by letting her call us or with daily or
She also discovered that she could buy inexpensive calling cards for ringing us, but I was at a loss to come up with a cheap plan for phoning her. The cost through my local phone company, a reseller of Verizon services, was about 10 cents a minute, and trying to hook up through my cell phone company, I’m a man of many words, and those phone bills would have been exorbitant. Finally, a piece of spam caught my eye. It was from a company called NickelTalk. It offered a $5 credit toward overseas calling if I registered for a free account. Monthly bills were to be mailed and the rate for calling France was to be only 5 cents a minute. It sounded too good to be true. I dawdled in responding and by the time I signed up, the $5 credit offer disappeared from the Web site. I It was one of the best online promotions I’ve seen from unsolicited The other overseas calling plan I discovered, OneSuite.com, proved to be reliable, easy to use and even cheaper for calls to Paris. I heard about it from my wife, who learned of the company from one of her U.S. Calls through OneSuite to my wife cost only 2.9 cents a minute, and calls to most other parts of the world are possible for very low rates. There were a couple of conditions. First, I needed to use a credit card to prepay an amount for calls; I chose $10. Second, I needed to call a local access number to get the Fortunately, there were a couple of local access numbers where I live, but in New Hampshire, there are none. Residents of Nashua and other border communities for whom Tyngsborough, Mass., is a local call could use the system for greater savings, because there’s an access number there as well as one in Lowell. Otherwise, N.H. residents have to use the 800 number, which means higher calling rates. There is a note on the OneSuite Web site that local access numbers in New Hampshire are in the works. As with many Fortunately, with all the calls I made to France over maybe three months, I never misdialed. I still have a credit with OneSuite and can use it to make I also linked my NickelTalk and OneSuite accounts to my cell phone service, which on nights and weekends, I was able to use for free. That meant wireless calls from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m. never ran up more than the Decision time nears I won’t be writing another column before Nov. 2, when we go to the polls to elect a president, congressmen and local representatives. Let me add my two cents worth that voting in 13 days is an opportunity not to be missed. Most U. S. presidential elections draw maybe 50 percent or 60 percent of registered voters to the polls. As the election of 2000 showed, another 7,212 Democratic votes counted in New Hampshire or 538 (!!) more in Florida, and Al Gore — not George W. Bush — would be our commander in chief. Your vote does matter, especially this year with polls showing such a close contest here in the Granite State and in 10 to 12 key «battleground» states, especially in the Midwest. Politics do matter. If you haven’t heard enough from or about the candidates already, you can go online at any of countless Web sites, including www.nashuatelegraph.com. If one of the major candidates does not seem to represent your views, check the positions of the independent candidates, decide and then go to the polls or make arrangements to vote absentee. And for every citizen who thinks that what happens Nov. 2 doesn’t matter in his or her life? I say «Hogwash!» (and maybe a few other things under my breath.) Just wait and see what happens or doesn’t happen afterward, because every action or nonaction has economic as well as political ramifications. See it in the cost of gasoline and TVs, in how much tax or Social Security surcharges we pay or not, whether we can travel freely, if we feel safe and proud to be American and how much does it cost to maintain those feelings. The man we elect (sorry, there are no women in the race) will be making See through the rhetoric; this opportunity will not last. Don’t be left on Nov. 3 wishing you’d had a say. My mind’s made up and my vote will count. Yours should, too. I’m the Savvy Shopper, and I approved this message. On the Net www.nickeltalk.com/ www.onesuite.com/ Googling on «overseas www.dial-abroad.org/longdistancecarriers.htm www.iconnecthere.com/nonmembers/eng/services/cards.html General www.bell.ca/en/care/oponline/bus/overseascalling.asp The Savvy Shopper appears on the first and third Wednesday of each month. Sherman Smith, Telegraph copy editor, can be reached at 594–6420, or at