The genion s card is a really good idea if you make land line calls from your "home zone". After setting-up the first free home zone, each change of home zone costs about 5 euros. You can choose any german address to be your home zone address, and set it up yourself on the o2online.de website. The home zone has a radius of up to approximately 2 km within a city, and it can be a bit wider in the countryside. (O2 only guarantee a maximum radius of 500m, but in practice the actual radius is bigger.) On many new phones, a "little red house" icon appears on your phone display while you remain inside your home zone.
This site gives an accurate idea of the coverage of a typical home zone:
http://gsm.yz.to/karte.php?x=379732&...ehz=43264&kr=1
You can click on the map to physically optimise your address in order to maximise your home zone coverage. You can click on "zoom" and then click on the map to move to other parts of Germany. You might need to press the "Zeichen" button to update the map. Use: move the location of the central "X" marker to your preferred home zone location and keep your desired base stations (the small dark blue squares) within the brown 2km radius circle. Whenever you update your home zone, you will find that your real coverage has a radius of about 1.9 km. So donīt be disappointed if you lose a base station just inside the edge of the 2km radius limit.
If you are into voip, you can cheaply call or forward voip calls onto the land line number of a genion s card.
Within the home zone, you can make cheap international land line calls using a service like budgetmobil.de. Calls to the UK work out at about 5 cents per minute if you use the genion card to dial the budgetmobile access number. (Genion 3c/min plus budgetmobile 1.78c/min into the UK.) Call quality and reliability are first class. No problems in the last year. Normal direct genion calls to UK land line: 11.3 c/min, to UK mobiles: 36.9c/min. Budgetmobile calls to UK mobiles using genion to dial into Budgetmobile: Genion 3c/min plus budgetmobile 11.2c/min = 15c/min. Budgetmobile announces the charge per minute when you set up the call.
You may also wish to consider one of the german prepaid cards that offer unlimited german land line calls for about 13-15 euros per month. Tchibo, Aldi, etc. Personally, I prefer Aldi because of their "anywhere within Germany" 24c/MB data rate. Genion cards also have the option of cheap data rates for connections made within the home zone. For example, "Internet@home-Pack-M" gives 1GB/month for 10 Euros. You might find better rates if you ask the gurus on this site.
The last time I checked, the genion s card had a 25 euro connection charge but no monthly rental charge. If you buy the "genion s card with a mobile", the "monthly rental" is 10 euros per month.
It is probably better to buy a "genion s card" in an O2 shop. That way you get free telephone support when you dial direct with the "genion s card". Otherwise, if you buy the card online (then appropriately called: "genion s card online"), telephone support costs 62 cents/Min from a Deutsche Telekom land line, and 62 cents/Min from the "genion s card online".