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Cheap international calls from Malaysia

NobelCom 10% discount code: WMALAYSIA-1784725821 (exp. Dec 31st)

A phone booth high up Mount Kinabalu in MalaysiaTravelers that visit Malaysia often want to call to check up on family or friends in their home country. This usually leads to high roaming charges when they are using their own telco. Calling via Skype is free, but not every traveler has access to Wi-Fi or 3G or has a smartphone and/or carries along a laptop/tablet. This article describes a way to make cheap international calls with phone cards while traveling. A phone card is a product designed to connect you to local and international destinations at significantly lower rates. When you use a phone card, you’re using a special access number to call anyone, anywhere in the world.

The cheapest way to use a phone card is by buying a local prepaid sim card first in the country you are residing, with that sim card you use the phone card. If you use your own telco, you might still end up paying high roaming charges to your own phone company, while you only have to top up a Malaysian prepaid sim card once to be able to call with a phone card.

Popular Malaysian prepaid telcos are Hotlink, Umobile, TuneTalk and Celcom. All of them offer cheap prepaid sim cards. Usually starting costs range from RM5 to RM20 (only a few USD). They come with 3G (speeds vary, but usually fast enough for regular browsing with 1mbps to 4mbps). Obviously you can simply use this prepaid sim to make local calls, but international calls are usually very expensive.

Here is where NobelCom comes in. They offer affordable phone cards, which allow you to make cheap international calls. NobelCom offers a few plans, but usually travelers are best off with the standard and most popular ‘No Connection Fee’ phone card.

When ordering a phone card you need to first choose the correct destination. So when you are from the US, you go for the Malaysia – US phone card. Based on your calling habits you may choose one of their plans (look specifically at the ‘Rounding’ part, where you see how much the conversation is rounded up per call). The phone card expires 1 year (365 days) after last use.

Paying is easy as they offer numerous payment solutions, including PayPal. After your order is completed you can follow the calling instructions at the NobelCom website.

Steps of calling with the phone card are easy:

  1. Make sure you get a local prepaid sim card.
  2. Call the local access number, or toll free number if no local access number is available.
  3. Enter the PIN to identify you.
  4. Dial the full international destination number.

And that’s it. You will now be able to call international for much lower prices and without ridiculously high roaming charges (were you to use your own telco within Malaysia). In our previous US example, you would only pay 9.5 cents with the cheapest Nobel plan to call from Malaysia to any number in the US (fixed lines and mobile phones). In other countries this might not be the case and results in slightly higher prices when you are calling mobile phone lines. Each country has their own calling rates. If you are traveling through numerous countries in Southeast Asia (or everywhere in the world for that matter) you can simply add a new phone card for each country. You can even move balance from one phone card to the other.

Smartphone users can use the special NobelDialer, which is available to iPhone, Android and BlackBerry users. With this dialer it gets even more easy to call abroad with your phone card.

Wonderful Malaysia visitors can now enjoy a 10% discount when ordering a NobelCom phone card. Just fill in the following discount code during the ordering process:

WMALAYSIA-1784725821

This discount expires on December 31st. Check out the NobelCom website here (opens in a new window).

This article was written by Wonderful Malaysia. If you have good similar tips to share, do let us know below by leaving a reply.

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