Call Star has a new access number. Please use 084 1976 776 to continue making free international phone calls with Call Star. As part of this change, we had to drop about 20-25 countries that we used to offer free international calling to. Most of those countries are located in Africa where our costs were too high to offer free calling. Our home page is updated with the new list of free calling destinations

The new access number is a VAS rated mobile number. It is included in the bundled mobile minutes of most operators. Cell C charges this number at R 2.5 per minute to call. If you are calling from Telkom, you should look into what it will cost you to call this number versus direct dialing.

We hope that everyone keeps using Call Star for their free international calling. Take down our number access number and tell your friends….Dial 084 1976 776 for free international calls.

Good news for people looking to make free international calls to Africa. We have found some new access numbers that will allow us to offer free calls to 25 countries in Africa and the Gulf region.

It’s best if you call these numbers from your mobile since the call will just use your included plan minutes. In other words you can call a South Africa phone number from your mobile, and then make a free international call through that phone number. If you are calling from your Telkom landline, then it will cost R 1.93 during peak and R 1.12 during Call More time.

Now on to the list of countries that you can make free calls to in Africa:

Angola
Bahrain +
Botswana
Chad
Egypt +
Gabon
Ghana
Israel +
Jordan +
Kenya +
Kuwait +
Lebanon
Malawi
Mauritius +
Morocco
Mozambique
Namibia +
Nigeria
Reunion Is.
Saudi Arabia
Seychelles +
Swaziland
Uganda
Zambia
Zimbabwe

In addition to calling Africa, you can also call the other 75 countries that we offer free calling to.

There was a dramatic increase in the cost to call Pakistan. Unfortunately this means that we have to drop it from our list of free calling destinations for the time being. If you were using Call Star to calling Pakistan for free, I am sorry but you are going to need to find a different way.

The rates went up across the board from all of the carriers we work with. That sort of unilateral increase means that the government of Pakistan most likely slapped a big surcharge on international calling into the country. They’ve done it in the past, so it would not be surprising if they did it now.

We’ll keep an eye on rates to Pakistan and hopefully they will start dropping down again. Once we can afford to add it back, we will.

We get a lot of comments from our users wondering why we do not include free calling to this country or that country. The reason is cost. We only include countries that we can afford to offer our free calling service to.

We cannot add additional destinations to the service because we cannot afford to terminate the calls there. Africa in particular is a very expensive continent to make international calls to. This is something that we have no control over. International calling costs are set by a combination of national telephone providers and the government. In countries where there is not a lot of competition, the phone companies generally will keep international inbound calling costs very expensive because they have no incentive to lower prices. In many countries, the government also looks at inbound international calling as a way to generate foreign currency revenues by setting high tariffs.

Call Star makes money by getting paid a portion of the interconnect fee generated on calls to our access number. An interconnect fee is what one phone service pays another for completing a call to a number on their network. For instance if you call on your MTN mobile, then you are paying MTN for your minutes, MTN is paying our phone service provider for completing the call (the interconnect fee), and our phone service provider is paying us a portion of the interconnect fee.

If it costs more per minute to call an international destination than we are getting from the interconnect fee, then we can’t offer calling to that country.

We are looking at alternative ways of offering these more expensive destinations. Help us out and let me know if you would pay for international calls to these other countries by going to a SPAR shop and purchasing calling credit from the store. Alternately, we could also offer a Premium SMS service which would bill your mobile directly for calling credit. The Premium SMS service would probably be more expensive than the SPAR service though because the mobile operators take such a big chunk of the payment for themselves.

One of the Seacom undersea cables that carries internet traffic from South Africa to Asia and Europe is having problems with a repeater. This is affecting a lot of internet traffic within South Africa and it is taking a toll on Call Star as well. We route our international calls using VOIP (voice over IP address) which basically means that your calls are being delivered over the internet.

While Call Star is still up and running, expect there to be difficulties with the service as long as South Africa’s internet service is affected by the Seacom problems. You may experience poor quality calls or trouble connecting to international destinations. There is not much we can do about this other than sitting tight and waiting for the problems upstream to be resolved.

Here is more on Seacom’s problems.

We have added free account registration to Call Star. Registering for an account allows you to use our Easy Dial, Speed Dial, and Pinless Dial calling features. Here is a bit about each of them:

Easy Dial

Are you tired of calling us, listening to our prompt, and then dialing your international destination? Do you call the same numbers over and over again? If you answered yes to either of these, then you are going to love our easy dial feature. The Easy Dialer lets your program a South African access number to directly call an international phone number. That’s right, you can skip our prompts and just program one local phone number into your address book and it will make an international call for you.

Each account gets 15 easy dial numbers (5 in Jo’burg, 5 in Cape Town, and 5 in Durban). Each of these numbers can be programmed to call one international number. Once you create an account, its super easy to program the easy dialer settings.

Speed Dial

Speed dial lets you assign your most called international numbers with short extensions. For instance instead of having to dial 19168443333 every time I wanted to reach that number, I could just give it a speed dial number of 33.

When I call into the Call Star system, I just dial 33# instead of the full number, and we automatically dial the full number for you.

Pinless Dial

Pinless dial is a service we mainly use with our paid products in other countries, but it can come in handy here. You can use the pinless dial settings to tie your Easy Dial and Speed Dial settings to multiple phone numbers. If for instance you make international calls from your home, office, and mobile to the same numbers, add them all to your Call Star account and now the Easy Dial and Speed Dial numbers that you have setup will work from all those phones.

Register Now For These Free Features

There is no cost to register. You are not committing to purchase anything from us. We are not going to ask for your credit card. These are free features designed to make it easier for you to make international calls with Call Star. I’ll try to get some more help information up on the site soon, but most of you should be able to figure this out. If you get stuck, try the help videos on each Settings Management page. They are from one of our other services, but explain the basic concepts well enough.

Now Sign Up For Free Calling Features!

Call Star has added 25 more countries that you can make free calls to.  There are some big countries on the list (like Pakistan), some small countries on the list (like Andorra), and some nearby countries (Zambia). We’ve also opened up calling to mobile phones in Indonesia to go along with landlines there. Other destinations worth noting are Vietnam and Bangladesh (land and mobile for both).

Here is the full list of countries that we have added:

Andorra
Bahrain
Bangladesh +
Brunei +
Croatia
Dominican Republic
Finland
French Antilles
Georgia
Gibraltar
Indonesia +
Latvia
Lithuania
Macau +
Macedonia
Morocco
Mariana +
Pakistan
Paraguay (Asuncion)
Reunion Island
San Marino +
Saudi Arabia  (Jeddah)
US Virgin Islands
Vatican City
Vietnam +
Zambia

One of the most common customer support questions that we have received so far is whether or not our access numbers are included in the Telkom Closer plans free calling windows.

Because each user is responsible for the cost of calling our access numbers, we ask that our users check directly with their provider about whether or not their particular calling plan’s free minute packages can be used to call us without incurring a billable call charge. We do this for a couple of reasons. First each user may be on a different service plan. Second phone service providers often make changes to their plans.

To date, our customers have told us that our access numbers are included in the Closer 1 and Closer 2 plans. Only a few customers have checked and reported this to us, and we have not asked Telkom ourselves whether this is the case, so we cannot confirm this.

If you do check with Telkom regarding the inclusion of our access numbers in the Telkom Closer plans, we would love for you to post what they told you in the comments section below. This will help other people who are on these plans, and it will let us know what the deal is ourselves or if there are any changes to that policy in the future.

Call Star offers free international calling because we get paid a portion of the cost of the incoming call to our numbers. This is what covers our costs and allows us to operate the service. At some point, you are paying for the cost to our local access numbers (either as part of your monthly plan or on a per call basis). What you are getting in return is a free international call that is usually much cheaper than the cost of direct dialing or using a calling card. We believe in being transparent about how the service works, so that you as an informed consumer can make the best decision about how to make international calls that cost you the least amount of money.

We’ve just added three geographic access numbers in Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban. These numbers are proving to be on a much better phone network than our previous access numbers and have resulted in a big jump in call connection, quality, and average talk time.

We are very excited to have these numbers, and to be able to offer the same high level of free international calling service that we already offer in Australia, Japan, and New Zealand.

Please find the best access number for you by looking at our access number box found in the top right side of this page, and enjoy your free international calling.