Pre-paid phone cards, for calls to Nicaragua $$$

Try WWW,sendglobal.com - 17,5 cents per minute to Nicaragua landline. Cell phones are 25.5 cents. Very good company for me. Roger

Union Telecard resells entex and IDT cards. Im paying .12 cents a minute on a card with local access numbers to Nicaragua. I also get the number of minutes promised. www.uniontelecard.com. Check out the Grande Florida card for an example of great rates.

Not sure if your real question is where to find a better price, or why are these two countries so expensive (or both). I think Honduras is worst in terms of costs in Central America, by far, as a destination country. The rates will ultimately be tied to what the -usually- government run telephone company says they will be. Pre-paid sellers mark up from there. Store-based cards mark up the thing yet again, on top of the access and profit charges, so normally a store-bought card (which lists the store name on it, like K-mart or whatever) is worse than a separate entity. And, if the store-bought card is tied to a major carrier (ATT, Sprint, etc.), then the fees often go up another notch, or two, or three. The details really matter on telephone cards, as do one's calling habits. Some cards have billing notches as high as 5 or 8 or even 10 minutes (they round up your call time to this much; so, a 1-minute call can be billed at as much as 8 or 10 minutes). Also, some cards charge more for the first minute than for subsequent ones, meaning you might get billed 2-10 minutes for leaving a 10-word message on someone's machine. Calling from a payphone might bring a 1 minute to 15-minute surcharge, too, or a 10-50% per-minute billing increase. And, as if this were not enough, some charge double the fee if you are calling to a cell phone (in some cases, even if that cell provider is one and the same as the pre-paid card company). Many of the cheapest companies have fees, too, which are often billed weekly, if not daily (as insane as that is). These cards can still be a good deal, but usually only if you use all your minutes every week. Read the fine print. Try to get a card that is rechargable, wont expire, has no fees or if it does they are small and billed monthly, that bills in 1-minute increments, and offers off-peak rates, too. If you call more than one destination country, regularly, that further complicates matters in that not all rules apply to all countries. There are many sites which rate cards, give the fine print, and allow you to see current rates around the world. Here is one (not an endorsement, just an example):

http://www.paytone.com/

I'm paying 40 cents per min using my phone card from MCI, but it's not prepaid, it's tied to my home number. Pretty easy to use, excellent connection, and I can call from any phone. It's expensive but got fed up with dealing with the games the phone cards play along with the noise.

I have found that store bought cards are pricey, even if they advertise good rates to Mexico or some such . . .

The store I use is online, they have a search engine that lists several different brands of prepaid phone cards based on from which location you are calling from (i.e. "lower 48") and the destination to which you are dialing. I use the one that comes up first in the search results, "Mexico's Best." I recharge the same card online. They also have a toll-free number to recharge or buy more cards.

They say it costs $.13 per minute, but I always have my doubts about the number of minutes available at the beginning of the call, after dialing the destination; it seems that the call ends waaaaay before you use up the quantity of time they say you have.

There are tricks these companies use too. I do not like the minimum charges, charges for using it, not using it, in large chunks (i.e. bills on 3 minute intervals), expiration dates, etc.

Also, if you read the rates for different companies, it is interesting to see the varied prices. if Nic. is 13 cents, Honduras is 20, and Argentina 3 cents . . . I wonder how they evaluate their industry and come up with the rates they do . . .

When I make calls from the internet cafes to the US I usually pay 2-3 cordobas a minute so thats about 12-18 cents. They use NET2PHONE as their call provider. So when I got back to the states I figured I will try NET2PHONE surprisingly if you go to their website and plug in that you are in Nicaragua and calling the US, it will cost .043 cents per minute. However if you type you are calling from the US to Nicaragua it is .49 cents a minute. Thought the prices may be wrong so I called NET2PHONE and they said the prices are correct, but they could not give me a break down why they charge close to .45 cents more if you are calling from the US. Pretty crooked if you ask me!

I have used a dozen different phone cards in the US the best 2 I have had limited success with are "True International" and "Latina Express". They range about 20-25 cents a minute, however don't buy in denominations over $5 since the calls disconnect for what ever reason very frequently and then they take a chunk of your minutes away.

I have also used a plan on Verizon, you pay about $5 a month and the calls to Nicaragua are about 33 cents a minute.

Hope this helps. If anyone has any other better solutions please let me know as well.

for the telephone rates from Nicaragua to Bolivia.

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There is a company called "El Toro" which offers good rates for Nicaragua, and Honduras too (at least good for Honduras, compared the crappy ones you found, which are very common in U.S. stores), and maybe every place. They might only sell cards online now, but my old link doesnt seem to work. Last time I used them, I think it was .20 for Nicaragua and .30 for Honduras. When I selected this company they had good plans, in that the customer is not $$$ punished (too much!) for making short calls, or not renewing the card monthly or bi-monthly, or if they needed to call from a pay-telephone. At the tiem of these rates, ATT was selling cards for %250 of these costs.