[Cassandra86]

I have arrived back home in HK for the summer, and have been driving myself insane the past 2 days since I got back, trying to figure out a cheap way to call the UK. I would like to be able to call the UK from my MOBILE rather than a landline (I know its cheaper with a landline but I dont have access to one). Also, all the people in the UK I would like to call have mobiles so basically I'm talking about mobile to mobile contact internationally. I know it ain't cheap but anyways I thought of getting a calling card but everytime I went to Smartone Vodafone store or 7-11 they mentioned a pre paid sim card, so I bought it, just tried it, and I followed the instructions exactly, and it came up on my phone in chinese, so I cant understand a thing, and the prompts to activate the sim card didnt even work. My mobile phone can only call locally in HK (and I dont want to change it) and my UK mobile phone has signal here, however when I use that to call London its super expensive and I do like to talk a lot.

Sorry about being long winded but what are my options?

[PDLM]

You've hit on the fundamental problem - calling a mobile in the UK is always going to be dramatically more expensive than calling a fixed line (whether you use a fixed or mobile line here makes much less difference).

For reasonable quality you should be able quite easily to find HK$0.30/min to UK fixed links (down as low as HK$0.18 or so on some promo deals), but to UK mobiles most plans will be around HK$2-3/minute, and you aren't going to find anything of quality below HK$2 on a consistent basis (although Sunday currently seems to have a promo at HK$0.99 that isn't sustainable because I know that they can't be making any money on that).

The basic reason is that mobile operators in the UK charge more than 10 times as much to terminate each minute of incoming call as the fixed line operators do.

So the answer really is to get your friends to be on their fixed lines!

(And for calling to fixed lines (from a single registered mobile phone) you can get an "all you can eat package from HGC for HK$38/month - details here: http://www.hgcbroadband.com/idd0088/index_e.html You need to sign up by July 10th.)

[HK_Newbie100]

Skype Out at UK 1p/minute to landlines

[PDLM]

Originally Posted by HK_Newbie100

Skype Out at UK 1p/minute to landlines

How's she going to do that from her mobile? And in any case that's more of less HK$0.15/minute which isn't much of a saving for all the hassle of only being able to make phone calls when tied to your PC... And HGC's 0088 flat rate HK$38 service would be cheaper for volumes in excess of about 10 minutes per day on average, which I get the impression is well below what Cassandra is talking about.

[lowlight]

The Peoples IDD stored value SIM card charges HKD$2 per minute to call a UK mobile line. Landlines are "free" which means HKD$0.25 per minute (the local airtime charge)