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I checked out your blog and saw that you're promoting Buzzirk so I did a little research today and what I found was rather interesting. First, though, let's understand what their offering is relative to the example call to China in the post above. If I was using the least expensive plan from one of the major carriers I'd be paying around $40/month instead of $70 + $10 for the unlimited international calling plan to 40 countries. At $0.01/minute with the dial-around plan that'd be 1000 minutes for the extra $10 you gave Buzzirk for unlimited international calls. Might not be such a good deal, depends on what you want to do. Their offer for unlimited domestic voice and data at $70/month might look really good to some people, though.

Their technology is interesting as well: they lease data bandwidth from AT&T and T-Mobile (the US GSM providers) and "tunnel" through that with VoIP for voice calls. So far as the AT&T and T-Mobile networks are concerned, there is no voice traffic from the Buzzirk phones, only data. I suppose it remains to be seen how well this will work in less than optimal conditions, but it's interesting.

At the bottom of all this are two things that are new: the VoIP encoding scheme they use on their phones and the deals they signed with AT&T and T-Mobile for the GSM data network access. Unified Technologies Group, Inc. put those two things together through Zer01, which they own. It's known as an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) and Global Verge is an MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) firm selling the Zer01 product under the brand name Buzzirk. So far I haven't found any other outlet for the Zer01 service and did read that Global Verge had some sort of an exclusive arrangement with them.

Then there's this article just released by Computer World today:

Zer01's mobile offer: Too good to be true?

I'd personally be a little nervous about giving Global Verge $70 up front and $40/month for the privilege of promoting the Buzzirk product

Thanks for information. I found the article about Zer01 very interesting. Keep up the good advice.

I've been using calling cards and dial around service since...I can not remember really. Local phone provider rates are way way more expensive than prepaid calling cards. I use Onesuite now and the rate comparison is like the one you posted above.

Same can be said about mobile roaming rates. Just look at this comparison chart between a prepaid calling card vs major telco providers.

OneSuite International Roaming Rates Compared with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile

The difference between Onesuite calling card vs Verizon or Sprint is 10to 20 times depending on what country you're calling from.

Right on, hadn't checked them out before. It looks like they'd be a good all round solution for calling between multiple different countries. What I've found is that the best rates for calls between any two given countries varies considerably by which dial-around service you use. For someone who travels a lot, it looks like this would be a good plan.

I think it'd be hard to beat what you can find here for calls originating from the US, though:

International Rates Comparison Tool

I just use TracFone Wireless for all of my long distance international calling. They allow calling to over 60 countries for no extra cost...every minute you call long distance is the same price as every minute you call locally...I've been traveling a lot this summer and it's been ideal for my situation...it's really the best deal in town, check it out.

Yup, Tracfone is a great deal. They don't have the fanciest phones but you only have to pay for the minutes you use and, like you said, those minutes can be used to call over 60 countries in addition to US calls. I did note that the international calls don't include calls to mobiles unless they specifically state that. I had noticed before that calls to mobiles in many countries are more expensive than calls to landlines so I did a little research and found that it's because in those countries the caller pays for the air time, as opposed to the typical US plan where incoming calls use the minutes you've already paid for, same as outgoing.

Another thing Tracfone is good for is people visiting the US who want an inexpensive mobile instead of having to pay expensive international roaming charges. For less than $50 you can get a phone and 300 minutes of airtime.

I recently added it to the site where I'm collecting this type of information:

Cell Phone International Calling Guide - Other Useful Sites