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From: vic@cs.arizona.edu (Vicraj T. Thomas)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Best and Worst (was: Labor Day, 1990)
Message-ID: <12344@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 19 Sep 90 17:10:23 GMT
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In article <12062@accuvax.nwu.edu>, john@bovine.ati.com (John Higdon)
writes:

> Which reminds me of why many Americans don't experience such problems
> in other countries. They carry a card which is accepted for telephone
> calls around the world. It's called the AT&T Calling Card. It works
> because AT&T established agreements with countless foreign telecom
> agencies. It works from hotels, public phones -- U-name-it.

        I was in the transit lounge of the Tokyo airport this summer
and wanted to call somebody in the city.  I didn't have any yen with
me but I did have my AT&T calling card.  There were two kinds of
phones in the lounge -- regular KDD (did I get the name right?) phones
that took coins and the KDD debit card and a USADirect phone.  I
talked to a KDD operator using the USADirect phone but she said I
couldn't use my AT&T calling card or my Visa to make a local call.  I
got the same answer from the regular KDD phone.  So Mr. Higdon, the
AT&T card is not as "universal" as you might think. It is however a
great card to have for calling the US from almost anywhere in the
world, including India which was a runner-up for this newsgroups
"Worst Telecom Network in the World" award.

If I was going to be in Japan for longer than the hour and a half at
the airport, I could have easily bought a KDD debit card and made all
the local calls I wanted.  Try getting a calling card in the USA
without a "permanent" address.


vic@cs.arizona.edu              Dept. of Computer Science
 ..!{uunet|noao}!arizona!vic     University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721