Call-in-Europe Gives You a Euro-Mobile For Less

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, about five million Americans travel frequently to Europe every year,  but many of them end up spending a fortune staying in touch with friends locally or back home. International roaming rates for U.S. numbers and phones from carriers like Cingular and T-Mobile usually run about a dollar a minute. Similarly, outgoing call charges on prepaid European SIM cards are around 75 U.S. cents per minute for local calls made in Europe and over a dollar if you're calling the U.S. from Europe (after the currency exchange from Euros). And renting a local phone costs even more.

Unfortunately, not many cheaper options exist (and I'm sorry, but VoIP services like Vonage and Skype are simply not as reliable or as easy to access as the mobile phone GSM networks in Europe).

Unless you're traveling to France.

In fact, anyone who uses a mobile phone in France for more than five hours per year can benefit from Call-In-Europe, a new service launched today that brings down those per-minute charges to 25 cents for local calls (in France) and 49 cents for calls to other European countries and the U.S. Plus, you get a local French number.

The catch? You have to pay $300 to access the discounted rates, but again if you talk for more than five hours per year, you'll start saving money over the other world phone options (provided, of course, that you buy a cheap enough tri-or-quad-band GSM phone to use with your Call-in-Europe SIM card). You'll also get free incoming calls from anywhere in the world, as the Euro-folks do, but the rates shoot up for incoming calls once you leave France.

But why not just rent a local SIM card once you get to France and put it in your GSM phone, or sign up for a local mobile service contract? I asked Patrick Gentemann, the president of Call-In-Europe, and he reminded me that those local SIM cards you buy at, say, SFR stores in France, expire after three months of non-use, and that local prepaid outgoing calls cost at least 75 cents per minute, after factoring in the exchange. In addition, actually getting one of those contracts can be a pain in countries like France unless you can prove you have an actual address in France. Not to mention the monthly minutes that expire at the end of every month with traditional cell phone plans.

Right now the service is only set-up for France and uses SFR (the French mobile carrier run by Vodaphone and Vivendi), but Gentemann says it will expand to other European countries in the future.

Sounds like kind of an esoteric service to fulfill a niche demographic of wealthy, jet-set Americans who don't know a SIM from an SMS. But according to Gentemann (and the U.S. Department of Commerce), about 700,000 Americans travel regularly to France and spend an average of eight nights there, so maybe he's on to something. After all, the service is a simple solution, billed in dollars, and offers 24/7 customer support in English.

When you travel abroad, do you use your mobile phone a lot? Is this something you could use? What have you been using until now to stay in touch?