Please, Mr. AT&T, MCI, Sprint: How Can I Call Home Cheaply from Overseas?

A Cancun hotel once charged me a whopping $6 a minute to call Miami. A distinctly undistinguished London hotel once charged me $8 a minute to phone New York - and I've heard of worse horrors from traveling friends. While some foreign hotels won't gouge you quite that badly, they all administer a bit of a fleecing to guests who simply pick up the phone and blithely dial an international number.

There are ways to minimize those outlandish charges. In ascending order of effectiveness, they are: Use a U.S. access number as a first start at reducing your costs. With access numbers, there's no need to sign up for anything, no monthly charge to pay. The Big Three of American telephony - AT&T, MCI, and Sprint - all offer special money-saving access numbers from dozens of countries around the world, and these can be obtained from their ...