Phones

Your home will have a telephone. Depending upon where you choose to live, your phone may or may not be capable or making international calls. If your phone line is not capable of making international calls, you can easily have a second line installed that is capable of making international calls.

A recurring annoyance for teachers living in Nouvelle Condominium is the limited number of trunk lines which makes it frustrating to call out or connect to the Internet on certain hours of the day when most residents are at home. All outgoing calls outside NC are also charged 4 baht per call regardless of whether you got through or not. Of late the NC management has also started limiting calls to 30 minutes, so if you are on the Internet or in a middle of a conversation you could be automatically disconnected without warning when your time is up. This is one reason why some people have resorted to mobile phones.

Pay phones are common in many public places including shopping malls. Even TCIS has both local and international pay phones.

Phone Cards

There are also pre-paid phone cards with relatively lower rates for overseas calls. The school sells Lenso international phone cards for 300 baht.

Phone cards used from your home can be purchased at the stationary section in Central Department Store, at the Post Office in the basement of Central City Bang-na (and I'm sure other post offices around Bangkok), as well as at 7-11 stores. The name of this particular card is "PhoneNet". They are sold for B500, and B1000. The school also sells cards one may use at the yellow international phones found around Bangkok (also as TCIS). They are sold for B300, and B500.

– Tara

[Lenso Phonecard] is the public cardphone operator licensed by Communications Authority of Thailand (CAT). This enables us to provide the international calls to the public on our phone booths.
Our "Bright Yellow" public phones are outstanding and available throughout the Kingdom of Thailand. The phone booths are located conveniently for both foreigners and Thais, such as hotels, airports, shopping centers, tourist sites and on side walks, etc.

Besides our phone card, our payphones accept all international credit cards as well as local credit cards. We also accept AT&T cardholders can make phone calls our payphones by simple pressing the "hot key" on our payphones to get direct service from AT&T.

http://www.lenso.com/phone.php

Cellphones

(contributed by Andrew)

A decent Nokia costs about 50 to 100 dollars American, other brands are widely available, or, if you bring your own, you can mostly likely get a SIM card for it, and it will work here in Thailand. Don't make the mistake of using your cell from home without switching to a local SIM card, as some have done, as your phone bills will murder your finances! The rate is pretty much standard at 5 baht per minute in Thailand (about 11 cents US), but rates can vary widely for long distance, so you might want to check your plan, or buy a long distance phone card, if you plan to call home often. Some here use a monthly service for their cells, but it may be better to buy time on a card (available widely all over the country) as it is easier to control your costs this way.

The most popular services used by TCIS teachers are DTAC for the monthly service, and One-to-Call, for the pre-paid card. You can buy pre-paid cards almost anywhere, including gas service stations and 7-11 stores. As far as brand and models are concerned, there are US$400-500 polyphonic models with built-in camera and wireless Internet features. But most teachers get by well with the basic US$50-100 models which offer phone and text messaging, answering service, call diverts, etc.

Calls in Thailand

Visit this site for more info about the different options to call to and from Thailand , and be sure to read the Help & FAQ section at http://www.calls.in.th/categories.php?category_no=51