what's the least expensive way to call israel from the usa?

[Geoffrey Mendelson]

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 2:01 AM, sara fink <sara.fink at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> First, Orange isn't trustable. They will say you a price and in fact charge
> you other prices, etc. People who were abroad were charged for calls they
> didn't do, etc. A quick look at tluna web site about orange will reveal the
> real truth.

I have never had such problems. I have had to hire a lawyer to deal
with a billing problem with
Bezeq International and threaten to sue Roy DIsney (who owned half of
Pelephone at the
time) to stop them taking me to court because of a bill I never agreed
to. They then continued
to bill me for a phone I canceled (but stopped sending me bills) and
eventualy theatened to
sue me for the money due after I closed the checking account, when
their unathorized
deductions finally surfaced.

Orange has always been good to me an very straightforward with what
they offered and the costs. Some have been higher than expected such
as calling here from Holland on an Orange
phone, but they were very upfront about the charges when I called and
asked them to turn it
on.

Cell-Com is not much better a friend went in their office to change
their contract phone to
pay-as-you-go and they had to suffer all sorts of verbal abuse from
the manager including
threats of calling the police to remove them. Eventually he relented
and made the change.

BTW the 30ag a minute is based upon the full price being split among
the phone calls. If you
take the 140 NIS, drop off 20 NIS for the "box" rental, and 80 NIS for
the ISP charges, then
you see a much better rate.More like 40 NIS a month for 600 minutes.

I just assumed that you would not buy the box without the VoIP service
and would not use
the line for anything else if you were not in Israel and placed it in
a friend's or relative's
home or office.

The charges that Betamax shows do not include Internet access charges,
device costs,
etc, nor are there any ratings of service provided. It's just a simple
list of prices scraped
from web sites and may or may not be of any use. For example, they
also do not include
monthly fees or membership rates, etc. One could offer a rate of 1
cent a minute with a $100
a month membership rate on another page, and it would show as 1 cent.

Geoff.



>
> Even 30 agorot/min is a lot. The best prices can be found at betamax.
> Discalimer: I am not affiliated with them in any way. Take a look at the
> price comparison from this site:
>
> http://www.backsla.sh/betamax
>
>
>



-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem, Israel