Free Phone Calls to USA from France
 

Many vacation apartments now have a service call "Club Internet" or Orange's "International Calling/Internet", which allows free calls from France/Paris to any location in the U.S.
If the Apt advertises free internet, then you should ask if they have the "Club Internet" package. Our two friends here do have it, at 2 Paris Attitude apts., and we will be signing up for our girls. It costs me only 7 Euros/month extra.
If I had known about this, I wouldn't have spent so much time with Skype. Although if you apartment does not have it, it does not make sense unless you are staying longer term (6 months+)

I think this opens the wider question about unlimited free phone calls from apartment phones in France...

Here is what has been happening over the past year or two. France Telecom was the unique national provider of telephone service for 100 years...but they were forced to open their lines to competition by smaller companies (like in the US).

With the advent of high speed internet as well, Several smaller providers are able to bundle all services together for a fixed fee per month which is generally cheaper than the list price from France Telecom.

So a large number of users are signing up with 9Tel, Cegetel, Alice, Free etc, keeping their existing phone number, and getting

-unlimited local calling in France
-no monthly fee to France Telecom for line
-Adsl internet
-PLUS unlimited free calling to several other specified countries....usually includes UK, Spain Germany, AND also in some cases US and Canada.

Imagine being able to be on holiday in France, and being able to make unlimited phone calls to the US or Canada for no charge!

So if you are renting, check with the owner to see what plan they have.

There is usually no extra charge to do this (don't know about that 7 Euro per month), and it is not only Paris...it is everywhere in France where users have moved to a package pricing with an unlimited calling feature.

So check with the owner...ask what they have and then check on the website of the provider to make sure...the owner may not know of all the extras in his/her package.

It is pretty cool, and was certainly not available until only recently.

Happy dialing, Rouss

I'm still with France Telecom and have had the US & Canada as a local call for the past 4 years (along with 35 other countries).

Well, as long as people don't know any better, you can sell old known stuff like it's brand new once again every year :D.

Kerouac, can you tell me how you get this from France Telecom? We use Skype and Skypeout, but haven't seen similar offers from France Telecom. Mostly they seem to offer unlimited local calls for a monthly forfait, and since we don't make many, we've never been interested

Carlux, I have the "Optimale 4h" deal from FT. There is also an 2h and an unlimited deal, all of which make North America a local call 24/7. It also includes all of the usual stuff -- caller ID, call transfer, double calls, messaging services, etc.

Thanks Kerouac. I have to admit that normally I ignore France Telecom's ideas of what will save me money - we subscribed to one option once that cost us more in hidden costs than it was worth.

Optimal looks reasonable, but we have just invested in Skype phones, which means we can call North America for pennies, and probably wouldn't spend as much per month as their basic subscription. And we don't have to be tied to the computer to do it now.

>Imagine being able to be on holiday in France, and being able to make unlimited phone calls to the US or Canada for no charge! <

I can, but why?

I'm on holiday. I don't want to call anyone.

Should it be necessary to make the occasional call home, I can buy a phone card for less than 7E.

((I))

Most of the phone cards sold for 7€ or 7.50€ give you 600 minutes to North America -- that's 10 hours of blabber for about a penny and a half per minute.

It is nice to have free phone usage in the apartment. Coco has that service in her flat in Dijon. I took advantage of it by checking messages at home. It turned out that the bank left a meesage at home because there was a break down in the communication. The international dept. did not get the 2 messages that I left about being away. They did not freeze my account but wanted me to call them. I already have an active sim card. So I bought 10 euro worth of time just for emergency which never happened. Converted that amount to about $14, I could have called USA for about 14 minutes on my T-Mobile. For my future trip, if I don't have access to a sim card from friends, I will not pay a lot for the whole package. It is very expensive. If the apt. I like in price, location, and ambience does not have this service, I will take it.

<Coco has that service in her flat in Dijon.>
Actually it is "la Freebox" from Free. So handy! Now 70 countries can be called free of charge( New Alaska and Hawaï are free now as well)http://adsl.free.fr/tel/tarifs/
100 free channels
http://adsl.free.fr/tv/chaines/list_basic.html
100 paying channels
http://adsl.free.fr/tv/chaines/list_option.html
+ high debit internet
:-d

I wish I had that at home but I'm a bit too far from their network :-(