Making your phone card affordable for in state and out of state calling

June 16th, 2008

by Aimee

I have a phone card to make calls within my own state. Why are rates higher than if I were calling to another state?

As of March 30, 2007, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the U.S. mandates that phone card providers must pay a fee per minute to local long distance providers for in state or intrastate calls. This does not affect out of state or interstate phone calls.

Depending on the phone card you have, the carrier may be passing that cost on to you in an increase in your rate per minute. The best place to find this information is by click on the name or image of the phone card and reading through the About This Card page. Any intrastate calling increases because of this regulation will be listed on this page.

Some carriers are choosing not to pass this fee on to customers for the moment and are absorbing the cost. This is always subject to change, and if it does, we’ll make sure to post it in the About This Card page for those cards.

Phone Card Coupon for Week of June 16th

Through June 22^nd, receive 5% off your purchase or recharge of an Everyday USA phone card from ZapTel. Use the following code to receive the discount:

EVERYDAY

Enter the coupon code on the Review Your Order page, and be sure to click the "Add Coupon Code" button on the page to apply the discount. Offer expires at Midnight Central Time on June 22, 2008.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 16th, 2008 at 11:14 am and is filed under Phone Card Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Making your phone card affordable for in state and out of state calling”

Anonymous Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 6:14 am

Rate Change for in State Calls Just curious as to why customers were not notified of this change?
It doesn’t show up when you look at the rates within the 48 states.
I think the rates where less than 3 cents a minute when we originally signed up. It appears that the fees have gone up also.
It might be good to notify customers of rate changes as they occur as you do with special sales.
At 7 cents a minute within our state, this is no longer that atractive.
Do you have any plans that avoid this in stae increase?
Thanks
Gary Bainbridge
PS: I have a Flying Colors Card
Anonymous Says:
June 19th, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Re: Rate Change for in State Calls All rate and fee updates are located in the card detail pages for each card phone card. While rate changes are subject to change without notice, they are rare and in most cases go down instead of up. In this case, though, some carriers have had no choice but to pass the extra fee for instate calling on to the customer to cover the cost imposed by the FCC regulation.

The card I usually recommended to customers who have had a card effected by the FCC regulation is the Everyday USA card featured in this posting. It’s 2.9 cents per minute in state and state to state. There is a 7% surcharge per call which makes the rate about 3.1 cents per minute, but there are no monthly or weekly fees, and the card bills in 1 minute increments. The Everyday USA is rechargeable and has PINzap Pinless Dialing, but does not have online call detail records or speed dial. The lowest flat rate card we have is the True North at 3.8 cents per minute when using a toll free access number or 2.8 cents per minute when using a local access number.

As with any phone card purchase, choosing the right card always depends on your own personal calling need. If you need more personalized help, send us an e-mail at support@zaptel.com, and one of our Customer Service reps will be happy to help you. There are also postings here in our blog that talk about what to consider when purchasing a phone card.

We currently do not send out e-mails when each phone card has an update. We don’t do this, mainly, because our customers have expressed to us that they don’t want additional clutter in their inbox.

Now with that said, I can see a value to being notified about this and am curious to find out what our customers think.

Would you want to receive an e-mail from us with updates about your card?

What about a newsletter-like e-mail with updates about card changes in our store?

Instead of receiving an e-mail, would you like to know that you could check back here and I can update the information on our blog?

Or log into your account and see notifications there?

If you’d like to voice your opinion, preference, or idea, send me a note at suggestions@zaptel.com . You can also post your thoughts here. Both Ron (our CEO) and I love hearing back from our customers on what we can do to be a better service for you.
Anonymous Says:
February 18th, 2009 at 6:19 am

Would you want to receive an Would you want to receive an e-mail from us with updates about your card?

What about a newsletter-like e-mail with updates about card changes in our store?
Anonymous Says:
February 18th, 2009 at 3:58 pm

Re: Receiving updates from ZapTel By your post, are you saying that you would like to receive updates like e-mails or newsletters from ZapTel?

Also, I wanted to let everyone know that, as of January 2009, the carrier for the Everyday USA has included a $0.005 rate increase for instate calling. As stated in a previous reply, the FCC mandates a fee be paid from a phone card provider to a customer’s local or long distance provider for calls made within the state where the call is originating.

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