Dear LPG

I know that it may all sound foreign to some, but I also know that there are quite a few elders who have smartphones and I-Phones these days.  Perhaps one of the best reasons for having one is being able to call abroad using the Internet rather than the actual phone.  This now costs a fraction of the price of phoning … as long as you use the Internet, and call a phone that is also able to connect via the Internet, that is often the only cost involved.   Over the years it has become easier to be able to talk and see the person you are talking to using quite a few different apps (as they are called these days).   The two most popular ones are perhaps Skype and WhatsApp. 

We have been able to do this using Skype for over 10 years now, although at the beginning we had to use our computers, but as technology becomes more mobile, I think it is quite special that I can now get a call on my phone from the other side of the world and be able to see the person that I am talking to regardless of if I am at home or not.

But there is a down side to this and I want to tell a short story to illustrate it. 

It happened about a year ago that I received a call, on my mobile phone, from a friend who lives in Lee but we got cut off.  I called him back and we talked for about 10 minutes.  When I got my phone bill I found out that that call cost me just over  £18.00!  I phoned my mobile phone service provider and the explanation was simple. 

Apps like Skype and WhatsApp use the contacts in your phones address book and if you use them on your mobile phone they will often put the people that you contact in this way into your address book a second time. But the 2^nd entry will include the international version of their phone number even though you can use either version to make a mobile phone call.

When I called my friend back I made the mistake of using the international version of his phone number, so even though I was only making a call to London, England, my call was routed all the way round the world and back to Lee.

The moral of the story is… if you have the internet on your mobile phone and use one of the many video calling apps that adds to your contact list, when using your phone as a phone to call a local number, make sure that you are not using the international version of that local number. It can be costly!

 JB, Beckenham.

LPG would just like to add that the international dialling code for the UK is +44. (This is the code you would have to use to phone any UK telephone number if you were outside the country trying to call to someone living in the UK).  If you were to delete the version of the number with +44 it could affect your next attempt to make an Internet video call to that person.  So don’t do that, but if you want to be able to do both, please be careful when making a local phone call to them.

We did not find a lot of information on the subject but can offer the following…

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