With so many students and freshers taking up studies or jobs abroad the need to be in touch with friends and family back home has grown in leaps and bounds. Typically students and freshers in the job market abroad face the dilemma of a high need to converse with family and a low budget for making international calls. The good news is that mobile telephony has come up with a solution that is a real winner: a cheap calling card to any country in the world.

This system works like a pre-paid phone except that you buy a plastic card which reveals a number on scratching the appropriate place. You dial this number and get connected to the country of choice at local call rates. The difference amounts to a huge saving, and gives you a choice of rates and minutes of valid call time. For example, a calling card to India can be bought in the US for anywhere between $ 6 to $ 50 with varying validity of 30 to 90 to 365 days.

Phone companies have smartly tapped into this huge market by packaging their products in a bewildering variety of options, and an international calling card to any country can come with features like pay-per-second, city specials, talk time bonus and more. The best part is that, for instance, a call to India that would have cost at least a dollar from the US on a regular mobile connection can cost as little as 3 cents per minute, to less than a cent per minute depending on the package you choose. Of course the longer the validity of the card the cheaper the international call you make.

Even better is the convenience and ease with you can buy an international calling card. Calling cards can easily be found on the net, in local mom-and-pop stores, and other retail stores. It is better to be a little cautious while buying these cards, and opt for well known and reputed phone companies rather that unknown ones that offer incredible deals. Sometimes a fraudulent company may acquire all your personal data on the pretext of filling up application forms and misuse it in many ways. At other times, an international calling card may have hidden costs by way of toll charges or tax etc. So it is better to play safe and choose a calling card from a company whose name, as they say, rings a bell.

So thanks to responsive phone companies that provide a calling card to India and other countries in a number of affordable packages, a prolonged stay abroad has become a very manageable and pleasant affair.