This Is the Most Expensive Place to Call on the Phone

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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This Is the Most Expensive Place to Call on the Phone

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Before cellphone international call plans, calling overseas could cost well over $10 a minute. Skype and other VoIP services cut that cost to basically zero, but some people continue to use their phones and not PC-based products like Skype.

Today, wireless international call plans have brought the price to make calls to as little as $15 a month for unlimited overseas phone calls. Prices can vary, however, passed on the use of cellphones, landlines and texting.

There is no single standard for the most expensive overseas calls, which are usually those from landlines. Sometimes, rates can be lower if they are made by people who are part of a large organization. Universities have international call plans. Several tech companies also offer plans to cut prices.

24/7 Wall St. reviewed the call plan offered to students, faculty and employees of the University of Michigan. The plan covers well over 100 countries. Calls to Mexico and Canada are usually the least expensive with plans like these. The university’s International Long-Distance Call Rates has a service that allows people to search by country. Our analysis of these rates excluded Marisat (satellite, for ships at sea) rates that are usually $7 a minute.
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To call many countries, it costs less than $0.20 a minute. There does not appear to be a pattern based on country or population size.

The most expensive place to call is St. Helena, at $4.05 a minute. It is an island in the South Atlantic Ocean that is ruled by the United Kingdom. Discovered in 1502, it covers 47 square miles and has a population of 4,439. Passenger arrivals and departures over the year from October 2020 to September 2021 totaled about 1,500.

St. Helena may be the most expensive place to call, but, based on its population, almost no one calls there.
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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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