Call Mexico from the U.S. and you will discover that there are two types of long distance calls you can make. One is reasonably priced and the other is extraordinarily expensive. As you may have discovered through your own phone bill shock, the expensive call is probably the one you made to a cell phone in Mexico.

The cost to call Mexico from the U.S. can be as low as a few cents per minute to metro areas like Mexico City, Monterey, and Guadalajara and up to around six to eight cents per minute for the rest of Mexico. Recently, prepaid long distance card products have entered the market which are selling unlimited access to all parts of Mexico for a flat rate, making the cost per minute irrelevant. However, all of the long distance carriers face the same elevated cost to connect to a cell phone. It turns out that, due to the unique public/private nature of Mexican utilities, there is not much competitive pressure on cell phone rates to come down. Since there is no pressure to change, the rates are going to be what the one major cellular operator in Mexico thinks the market will bear. Right now, that rate is between $.18 and $.30 per minute depending on the area you are calling. Make a few long-winded calls at that rate, and you will wish you hadn’t.

In the interest of making expensive calls intentionally and not by accident, here is what to watch out for. All international calls from the U.S. begin with “011”. This routes the call to the international long distance network. The next step is to let the network know which country you are calling. To reach Mexico, you would enter either “52” or “521”. If you enter “52”, you have told the network that you are calling a landline located somewhere in Mexico. If, however, you entered “521”, you just told the network to connect to a cell phone in Mexico and initiated a rate that bad phone bills or dead prepaid cards are made from! Hopefully, you have learned this fact here and not from your first two hour call to a “521” phone. BlagCard dx.doi.org/10.2121/Call-Mexico-060407
© 2007 Information Regeneration, Inc. -This article may only be reprinted in its entirety, unedited and with all links intact.

Jay Sanchez is a freelance writer specializing in communication technology. This article is courtesy of BlagCard, a prepaid unlimited long distance card to Mexico that lets you talk for Days, not minutes.

Source: www.isnare.com