Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: ima!johnl@harvard.harvard.edu (John R. Levine) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Making International Phone Calls From France? Message-ID: Date: 3 Jul 89 18:55:19 GMT Sender: news@vector.Dallas.TX.US Reply-To: "John R. Levine" Organization: Segue Software, Inc. Lines: 51 Approved: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.dallas.tx.us X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 222, message 1 of 8 In article Michel Jacquemin writes: >I am going to be in France next month and will need to make some >international phone calls (more precisely to Spain). Can people tell me >what the most convenient way to do that is? ... > >Stupid question: can I make any use of an MCI or an ATT phone card >for that purpose? Last question first, no you can't; MCI and AT&T don't handle calls that don't have at least one end in the U.S. French payphones are tons of fun. There are two kinds, the kind that take coins and the kind that don't. In Paris, they're all coinless except for the funky little ones you find inside stores, other places they're being converted to coinless from coin as they get around to it. To use a coinless phone, you need a Telecarte (accute accents over the first two e's) which is sold at all France Telecom offices which are generally inside or next door to post offices. They come in two (logical) sizes, 50 units and 120 units. Last year the 50 unit card cost F40 and the 120 unit card cost F100, I don't know if they've gone up. All calls in France are charged in units, with the time per unit depending on the distance, ranging from 12 minutes for a local call at 2 AM to 1.2 seconds for a call to the South Pacific. For calls to Spain, I'd expect a unit to be worth something between 30 seconds and a minute, depending on the time of day. It's all in the front of the phone book. To use your card, you stick it in the phone and wait a moment, and a little display shows you how many units you have left. Then dial 19 for an international call, get a second dial tone, and dial the country code, 34 for Spain, and the city code and phone number. When the calling party answers, the phone starts counting down the units until you hang up. Then it tells the little microprocessor in the card how much it's worth and gives you the card back. I've never used up a card, but I presume if you run out of units if cuts you off and you have to call back with a fresh card. Once you get the hang of this it's very handy. The price per unit is about the same as you'd pay for a call from a regular phone. If you have to use a coin phone, you dump all your change into it and it eats the coins as needed, giving back the ones it didn't use. You get no change. It is still possible many places to call from a post office and pay them, but I can see no advantage to doing so unless you know you'll never place another call and the one you're making will cost less than F40. (F40 is worth about $7.00.) For the particular case of calling back to the United States, you can get an AT&T or MCI operator by calling 19-0011 or 19-0019 and place a calling card or collect call to the U.S. In a coinless pay phone you need a telecarte but it won't deduct any units. -- John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869 { bbn | spdcc | decvax | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something Massachusetts has 64 licensed drivers who are over 100 years old. -The Globe