I live outside the UK but visit regularly, often staying with a selection of friends/family/colleagues.  Rather than take advantage of their hospitality I want to use a carrier forward select operator to make calls from their landline but at my cost.  I used to have a service from Alpha Telecom (dial an access number + dial a 'pin number', then dial call) but they are a nightmare when it comes to keeping the account in funds as they just wipe out the balance without refund if you don't use the service for a few months.  For me the whole point is that when I want it it just has to work - I had some long chats with Alpha telecom call centre in India but will NEVER want to go down that road again!

Anyone able to suggest some viable alternatives please, no problem to do a 'pre payment', as long as the balance doesn't get nicked if not used for a pre determined time and the call rates are half way reasonable.

I was thinking jajah or nonoh but can't always be sure that I will have internet access to set up the call.

Thanks an advance for any suggestions

Check out 1899 and 18185, 1899 being the cheaper of these two, although there are many others also.

Their setup allows you to add additional numbers, other than your home number, to your account so that any calls you make from any of the other numbers (prefixed with 1899 or 18185) will be charged to your account.

The reason I suggested both is in case one of the places you stay at happen to use one of the services already, in which case you'd use the other. Personally I get away with just using 1899 & its worked fine over the last few years. Takes a bit of explaining initially to the friiends whose phone I use but I've had no problems so far.  ::)

DaveM wrote on Apr 12^th, 2008 at 11:22pm:

Check out 1899 and 18185, 1899 being the cheaper of these two, although there are many others also. Their setup allows you to add additional numbers, other than your home number, to your account so that any calls you make from any of the other numbers (prefixed with 1899 or 18185) will be charged to your account.

But the prefixes are only certain to work from BT landlines.

18185 is the cheapest for weekday calls to UK mobiles (5p connection + 6p per minute).