I'm an Orange mobile customer for over ten years. In that time I have had one phone upgrade, and a lot of very expensive bills. The phone upgrade didn't last long. It was an Ericsson T28s which didn't allow you to speak. You'd dial a number and could hear the person on the other end answer hello before hanging up. I remember walking into an Orange Retail Shop on Oxford Street only to be told they couldn't help as the Orange shops were seperate. Great Service!

If you don't upgrade your phones you're meant to get a discount. I've never had one. Occassionally my monthly bills top a £100. Am I on the right plan? Who knows, all this marketing gibberish about Dolphins, Racoons and Panthers is just too confusing.

In any case, the issue is international calls which are normally out of plan and where the Mobile companies rake it in.

If I'm away in Cork it's 38pence a minute to make a call, 19pence a minute to receive a call and 25pence to send a text message. From the UK I call Irish mobiles and at the end of every month I am left with unused minutes and unused texts which only roll over a month. Orange keep the rest.

The good news, I found a way to do it for free. All I get charged is a local rate call which gets swallowed up in the unused minutes I lose every month. Mobiles in all the countries listed below can be called for free...

Ireland, USA, Autralia, South Africa, Canada, Belgium, China, France, Spain, Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Lithuania, Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovnia, Skovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK

The company doing this are called Rebtel. With a name like this they should come from Cork, but they don't. They're based in Stockholm, and it's easy to get started.

Next thing I need to find is how to make free or very low costs txts, anyone out there in Neverland know the answer?

Well Done, Mark

I have used this service over the last couple of days, to satisfy my sceptical side, and I have saved approximately €41.53 based on my average international call rate per minute of 68c (average, I could'nt be arsed working out peak and non peak rates).

Now if we could find the low cost text version we'd be "quids in".

Glad to hear you're saving money, and overcame your skepticism to give it a go. I'm always surprised by how few do