This might seem like a dumb question - but I have never tried this. I have AT&T for my long distance & international on my USA home phone. However - I have a local company for my service, billing and local calls.

If I forward my home phone to my global sim cell phone, would I be charged for international calls from my local provider or will the call forwarding also apply to my ATT long distance?

I Ass-U-Me that it would be charged by your long distance carrier. Why don't you try it and see.

You would surely be charged for the international portion of the call. Who would charge it depends on which you use. Probably AT&T

Let me try & explain better!

My USA local service has horrendous long distance & international rates.
However their local service is good. They provide my phone line & bill.

My long distance/International carrier associated with my home-line is AT&T & I get great rates from them. I get a seperate bill from AT&T for just the long distance & international.

If I forward my home phone to my Global sim cell phone - will my local home line be charging me their high rates or will AT&T who are my chosen longdistance/international carrier automatically bill this call even when forwarded?

AT&T

As Matha said, billing on forwarded LD would be billedl like direccted dialed LD. ATT in this case.
HOWEVER, most local carriers (major exception is Verizon) do NOT permit you to program the system to forward to intl. numbers. SBC does not.
I have had to use www.kall8.com to forwardd calls overseas. Forward my calls to the Kall8 number that then forwards to overseas number.
I am hoping that YackieMobile, being discussed in another thread here, will solve my problem. They give you a "local" number keyed to your intl. SIM. They seem to be a new start up and they won't be sending out SIMS for about a week. No one here has tried them, yet.

...mike

When I used to have a landline in the US, I used Simplicity long distance from Americom. I had no problems forwarding abroad and they had a 10 cent rate to Lichtenstein.

I've since gone VOIP and with my Asterisk box have no problems forwarding abroad. If you want a good forward number which charges no monthly line rental, take a look at Voicestick. It is a VOIP service, but it also offers international call forwarding. Many VOIP providers have stopped international call forwarding because of the high incidents of toll fraud.

Stu

Stu - Thanks for the tip about "voicestick". I just signed up for their "free" service where you can set up CF to an overseas number. In my case to Costa Rica. They charge 5?/min. The lowest rates I could find before this were dial arounds. Pingo at 6?, Tel3advantage at 7?, Onesuite, 8? and Lingo, our main LD carrier (VOIP), 9?. Lingo does provide telco quality and instantaneous connection.
The couple of test calls i made had very good quality - much better than the dial arounds. Connection time was acceptable. There seemed to be some "false" connections (which i was charged for). We'll have to see how that goes.

...mike

Voicestick also has a good virtual calling card feature which is handy.

Their rates to UK mobiles are also pretty good. They have the best rates to the UAE that I have seen.

I also just signed up with voicestick -- primarily because of those rates to UK mobiles (spending 10 days in london next month). I will fwd calls to my voicestick number which will fwd to my Virgin UK mobile (Hopefully!)

Has anybody used the actual USB stick in a public (i.e. internet cafe) computer? I would be interested in how well it worked (and did you run into firewall problems).

TheMadBrewer, what are their rates for forwarding to UK mobile? The only thing I saw there is that there will be an additional small fee for forwarding to mobiles. May be I was looking at the wrong place.

Rates are 13 to 16? depending on which cel carrier you are calling. To find the rates, go to "plans". The bottom of the 3 in the drop down menu is: Intl rates.

...mike

What is strange about their pricing is that the rates charged to "basic" users is 10 to 15% cheaper than what full plan payers are charged for intl. calls.

Where can we find info about their virtual calling card;

I caught thta as well. I don't seem to being surcharged on these calls. They charged me 16 cents a minute on a test call I placed to an IOM SIM.

By the way, voipcheap.com has a $0.07 a minute routing to UK mobiles. This is a seperate program from voipcheap.co.uk by the way. I think they are both Finerra companies. There has been a lot of people saying that Finerra did something in the last day or two to interfere with Asterisks servers connect to their accounts. The company has good rates, but some screwy business practices. Their rates also move around quite a bit.

Stu

As much as I hated to leave the home of sushi and udon, I'm back in the USA now. Even though I was not using a global prepaid SIM in Japan (my grandfathered T-Mobile roaming rates in Japan are very good) I did make a lot of use of my VoiceStick account. When I was in a place where I had a direct landline I could forward my T-Mobile cell phone to the VoiceStick number which I had set to forward to the landline. Turned out to be around 2 or 3 US cents per minute. When I was in places where I had some e-mail but no direct inward dailing (Some calls had to go through multiple dialing stages, if they were working at all) I just turned on the Voicemail to E-mail feature. In a hotel with free WiFi I used the VOIP service to make calls at 2c/min. It saved me a huge amount of money.

For those of you that are using voicestick, did you have to have an funds in your account in order to be able to do the forwarding?

Yeah, I set up my Voicestick with about $10 a few months ago. Looks like that $10 may last a long time.

Don,

Do you have any way to figure out old T-Mobile Roaming rates other than hit and miss. They took those rates off the website. Now, customer services seems unable to find them.

Stu

At various time I had written some down in various places. I plan on collecting the scraps of paper together into a spreadsheet, but at this point I have nothing organized.

I have been able to get my old T-M intl. roaming rates via email. Last time i did this was May 3rd. Here is what i got from them concerning Panama. (Never did get there. Got to about 75 miles from the border w. Costa Rica.)

=====
Here is the international roam rate if you were roaming on Telefonica Moviles Panama:

Local Calls - Peak: $0.70 per Minute
Local Calls - Off-Peak: $0.70 per Minute
Calls To US - Peak: $1.72 per Minute
Calls To US - Off-Peak: $1.72 per Minute
Incoming Call Rate: $0.00 per Minute
Calls to other countries: $0.99 - $8.99 per minute.

Here is the international roam rate if you were roaming on Cable & Wireless Panama:

Local Calls - Peak: $1.43 per Minute
Local Calls - Off-Peak: $1.43 per Minute
Calls To US - Peak: $2.20 per Minute
Calls To US - Off-Peak: $2.20 per Minute
Incoming Call Rate: $1.83 per Minute
Calls to other countries: $0.99 - $8.99 per minute.

The rates listed above are in U.S. Dollars ($) per minute
and are subject to change without prior notice.

Upon further review, I notice that you have been with us since October, 9th 2004 and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for being a loyal T-Mobile customer.
=====

Note 2 things. I was w. Omnipoint/Voicestream/T-M since mid 90's. The 2004 date is approx. when they started operations here in Ca. and i could make T-M my primary carrier w. a local number.

AND they say there is ZERO charge for incoming in Panama. I emailed them bacck to verify this, and they did. (Panama is 850 only.)

I have never tried getting rates fm. CS via phone.

...mike

1.83 v. 0. Quite a difference. In Kuwait, it was $1.50 a minute for incoming on one provider v. $7.40 a minute on the other.

Also, in the last couple of days, some Finarea companies have discontinued the call forwarding that they so recently promoted. A friend on another forum said this about Voipdiscount, and confirmed that it disappeared on download of a new version of the client program.

I have [unfunded yet] Voipdiscount and Voipcheap.com (voipcheap.co.uk is a sister company) accounts, and have sent Voipcheap an enquiry about this, but we know what they are like for replying to emails on out of the ordinary subjects. It is certainly fairly disappointing to lose this so fast, but luckily before I actually chucked a few quid at it. Perhaps it will be back, or perhaps it fell foul of fair use issues

Finerra has some good prices, but I don't trust the company at all. They change the rules all the time and it is very disconcerting. I am close to writing them off even though they are a good deal.

Apologies: this may have been a mistake.

I posted about it elsewhere, and someone has pointed out that the call forwarding is still there, no longer on the front panel, but via Call Settings on the settings tab. I've downloaded latest client versions and this seems to be true

I'm glad that I am wrong about them on this.