PennyTalk

So you have a friend or some friends and family in the rest of the world? You want to keep in touch, but you don't want to turn your phone into a drain that dials your wallet away? I get it. You saw the Pennytalk ad in the in-flight magazine and it looks to good to be true! What could be the catch? Penny is a services which is a service which supposedly offers international calling for only a few pennies a minutes. This is only slightly true. I think it is highly misleading as you will see, for the majority of the phone calls you make (under about 8 minutes). While the rate is low, there is an enormous base rate. The base rate is 49¢ for every call, whether you can understand the other person or not. So if you have to call two times before you get a good connection.... you can see where this is going. Also, don't worry about saving time with pennytalk. The customer service people regularly take upwards of 10 minutes of getting around to your phone call. Then there's that other issue - Pennytalk makes no intention of making phone calling easy for you, there is no speed dial or quicklist: you must remember that 10 - 17 digit number in its entirety, because you will have to dial it everytime you call. I use AT&T World Connect. This service recently switched from being country specific to worldwide. You use to have to pay 3.99 a month for every country you want a discounted rate to. This is now 3.99, for discounts to the whole world. (That's the equivalent of about 8 calls with penny talk). I've made up some charts comparing AT&T's World Connect and PennyTalk.

In summary, Pennytalk:
- has an expensive connection fee.
- will require more than one call to have an intelligible conversation.
- takes a long time to place a call (no speed dial)
- has bad voice quality.