Calling rates

Two columns per country, because in most of the world a landline and a mobile cost different amounts to reach and the difference is often large. Where you have a choice of number to call, that column is the cheapest decision available to you.

Every figure is US dollars per minute, and it is the whole price. There is no connection fee to add, no monthly minimum, no maintenance charge on a dormant balance and no rounding: billing is per second, so a call that ends at four minutes twelve seconds is charged as four minutes twelve seconds.

The rates are read from a single file at build time and rendered into the page. Nobody types a price into a template, which is why the table, the country pages, the calculator and the app cannot disagree with each other.

The price of an international call is mostly not a decision made by the company selling it. It is the wholesale termination rate: what the operator at the far end charges to accept the call onto their network and deliver it to the person you are ringing. Your provider pays that, adds a margin, and quotes the total.

Termination rates are set by a mixture of regulation and negotiation, and they vary enormously. Where a regulator has driven termination towards cost, and where our carrier has a direct route, the retail price lands in single-digit cents — today that is the United Kingdom, Mexico and Peru end of the sheet. Where termination is still a protected revenue stream for an incumbent, or where a handful of operators face little competition, the same minute can cost a hundred times more. The spread across the destinations we sell is currently about a factor of 150.

This is why the map of expensive destinations looks strange to anyone expecting it to track distance or wealth. The United Kingdom is the cheapest destination on our sheet at $0.03 a minute, while Switzerland and Denmark — nearer to most European callers and no poorer — cost more than a hundred times that. Distance is essentially irrelevant to the cost of routing a call over the internet; the terminating operator's tariff, and whether our carrier holds a direct route to it, is essentially all of it.

It also means a service that is cheapest to one country tells you nothing about another. Compare on the corridor you actually call.

The comparison people usually want is against roaming, and the gap is not marginal. Carrier roaming for voice commonly runs between one and three dollars a minute; a VoIP call to the same destination is usually a few cents. That is a factor of fifty to a hundred, and it dwarfs every difference between VoIP providers.

The second comparison is against an international add-on from your own carrier. Those are usually priced as a monthly bundle, which is good value if you call the same country every week and poor value if you call twice a year — the arithmetic turns on whether you use the bundle, not on its headline rate.

The third is against a calling card, which is where connection fees and rounding do the most damage. A card advertising one cent a minute with a 49-cent connection fee costs 50 cents for a one-minute call. The calculator shows the same effect for per-minute rounding on any duration you like.

Rates on this site are quoted in US dollars per minute, because that is the currency wholesale voice is traded in and quoting anything else would mean baking in a conversion that moves daily.

What appears on your statement is different, and it is worth expecting: the App Store charges in your local currency at its own conversion rate, and it applies local tax where your jurisdiction requires it. A $4.99 pack therefore shows up as a local-currency amount that is not exactly 4.99 converted, and the difference is Apple's conversion and your local VAT rather than a surcharge from us.

Call credit itself is denominated in dollars and spent at the dollar rates on this page, so the arithmetic between a rate and a balance is exact regardless of what you paid in. There is no second conversion when you make a call, and no currency spread applied per minute.

One consequence worth knowing: because the rate is a property of the destination and not of your location, moving country does not change what you pay per minute. Only the App Store side of the transaction is local.