Voip
Calling to and from cellphones is crazy expensive in Germany, like in most of the world outside the states.
Voip is a good alternative when calling from home for landlines — international calls can cost almost nothing, or nothing at all, but most providers charge heft rates on mobile telephones.
Neighbor Thomas tipped me off to one provider with a good deal, though: webcalldirect.com/.
Basically, landline calls are free to Germany, most of Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Celly calls in Germany are 10 Eu cents a minute, which is pretty good compared to what you would pay from a landline and awesome when calling from a cellphone. You can also SMS for 5 cents. I think it’s ridiculous that SMS –a clumsy text message limited to 160 characters including spaces– costs anything at all, but considering that my landline can’t send them and my cellphone charges me 20 cents, it’s all good.
The downside is that connection times, particularly to cellphones, can be slow — up to 30 seconds. Also, with webcalldirect you can’t have a callback number. Third, depending on net throughput, the speed of your connection, and the shape of your computer, the sound might be choppy. Finally, the further away you are, the delay gets worse and worse, much more so than with regular phones.
Meanwhile, also ran technologies like the paper cup and string industries are lobbying for new legislation to help subsidize truly inexpensive possibilities for person to person communication. But until then, we in Germany are just going to have to keep it short and to the point, just like we always have.