Home phone Guides

Get free international calls

Updated: Wednesday 18 January, 2012

By Anthony Hill - anthony.hill@consumerchoices.co.uk

Want to cut the cost of calls to friends and family abroad? Get a landline deal with free international calls and say “bonjour”, “hola” or “g’day” whenever you want without paying a fortune.

If you regularly make calls to overseas numbers, you’ll know just how costly international call rates are - and chances are they’ll make up a large chunk of your monthly landline bills.

BT (www.bt.com) customers, for example, will be charged £1.32 for a 10-minute call to Germany in the evening (including the one-off BT call connection fee). While this doesn’t seem like a lot, making a couple of calls like this a week will add over £10 a month to your bill.

Switching your home phone service to a landline provider that offers free international calls however, could really help reduce your bills. We explore some of the providers offering free international calls below…

Which providers offer free international calls?

As you can see from the table above, several home phone providers offer free international calls to selected countries at certain times. Switching from BT to one of these providers could help you make huge savings on your monthly landline bills.

TalkTalk cheap international calls - TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk) offers its International Calls Boost, a call plan add-on, for just £2.99 extra a month. With this you'll get unlimited calls to 36 overseas destinations, including France, Australia and the US. Countries that aren’t included in the free international calls deal include India, China and Poland. TalkTalk does offer very competitive rates to these countries however.

Post Office free international calls - The Post Office (www.postoffice.co.uk) also offers its home phone customers free international calls at weekends to 40 top destinations, including the US, Australia and Ireland. While it doesn’t offer free evening calls to international landlines its evening call rates are still very competitive compared to BT. A 10-minute call to France, for example, would only cost 60.7p (including the call connection fee) - a saving of 71p compared to BT.

O2 and BE also offer customers free calls to 22 selected international destinations - however this is only available to those customers who subscribe to their Anytime call plans.

You can’t get O2 or BE home phone services without signing up to their broadband, so if you’re looking to save even more money, consider bundling the two - you’ll get everything on one monthly bill, and could even get extra services.

Making cheap international calls using broadband

If you’re locked into a contract by your current home phone supplier and can’t switch, or don’t necessarily want to, you could make cheap calls using your broadband connection.

Using an internet phone service (also known as VoIP), such as those from Vonage (www.vonage.co.uk) or Skype, can help cut your costs, particularly if you sign-up to a tariff that offers free international calls or free calls to landlines using the same service. Have a look at some of the packages below:

For more information, read our Vonage sign-up FAQs.