What is the scam with the phone cards?

I sometimes use this phone card to call India, from the US. Can you believe the number of digits I have to dial for my call to go through? First the 11 digit 1-800 number of the calling card, then the 11 digit pin number, followed by the 15 digit phone number (including 011-countrycode-areacode-phone no.). That is a total of 37 digits dialled to make one phone call! It is so very easy to dial a wrong digit when punching so many numbers. When I am in a hurry (need to make an urgent call before going some place) or agitated (argument with someone, need to call them back), the frustrations of dialling 37 randomly sequenced numbers and getting it wrong a few times, probably shaves seconds or minutes off my lifespan!

Add to that the unreliable quality of the connection in the form of dropped calls, noise on the line, the possibility of being charged even when the connection with the calling party is not properly established. And then throw in other things like service charges, connection charges, weekly/monthly charges, half-, 1-, 2-, 3-minute rounding. That completes the misery of the calling India experience. A droning lifeless voice announcing, "You have one more minute of talk time left", before the connection is cut-off abruptly, no matter how important, critical or emotional the conversation is, makes the experience even worse.

It is possible to eliminate each one of the above obstacles and miseries. I do use services which don't have some of these problems. But such services come with a cost. Eliminating one to almost all of the above woes can cost me anywhere from 2 cents to 20 cents to 70 cents or even over a dollar more per minute of talk time, as compared to the phone card I've described above. Apart from the extra per minute charges, there could also be a flat monthly fee of 3 to 6 dollars.

Now, what is this scam with the phone cards? Why can't my home phone or my cell phone company offer me unlimited, unrestricted, good quality International calling at comparable rates? It is not as if there is no bandwidth. The bandwidth is there. And it is being sold by phone card companies in pathetic tiny, inconvenient to use packages. If the bandwidth is available, why can't I have it without the need to dial long phone card numbers and pin numbers? Why should I get it only in small chunks, which abruptly run out and end my call? Why can't my home phone or cell phone company buy all these chunks of bandwidth from the phone card companies or whoever it is that owns them, and offer them to customers like me in one convenient uninterrupted stream, at the same rate? I am sure there would be lots of willing buyers, who will help such a telephone company realize the economies of scale.

The situation is analogous to this: There is a great, well-built highway, available for our use. The only choices of transport we now have are small individual cars offering rides of different comfort levels depending on how much we are willing to pay. What I am asking for is something like a big bus or train, a mass-transport service which can offer reasonable comforts, at reasonable rates.

But we don't have a cheap mass-transport service available. In America, the cost of long distance bus travel is almost close to the cost of some air-ticket deals. Similarly, Indians calling India from the US have to pay extra bucks for good quality connections or suffer through the experiences of poor calling cards. Even calling Australia from the US is so much easier and cheaper. Although Australia is farther and certainly has less number of callers from the US!

When, oh when will the situation improve? I know that there will come a day when all these problems will be a thing of the distant past. We will be making free phone calls from anywhere to anywhere in the world, with any device - phone, cell phone, computer, whatever. I can see such a world of cheap, seamless communication. It is not too far in the future.

The Internet is an incredible portal which reduces communication time and distance to almost nothing. Such an Internet is within finger-tips access of me most of the time. A major part of my current life is spent in close proximity to high-speed Internet connections - both with cables and wireless, both at home and at work. Through this medium, I can exchange data, voice, video and typed communication with people around the world, in almost real time. I pay a sizeable fee for the pleasure of having a constantly available, high-speed Internet connection. I don't even utilize the full capacity of the connection available to me. I do not want to pay anything more for any of my other communication needs - not for my cell phone (unless I am "roaming" away from a Net zone), and certainly not for lousy calling cards.

Being in close proximity, most of the time, to such a medium as the Internet and being able to imagine a world of cheap or free seamless communication from anywhere to anywhere, my frustrations with the current long-distance calling situation is multiplied many times. When I use these calling cards to call India, I feel like a Formula One driver from the future, who normally owns and drives F1 cars for free, being zapped into the past and asked to pay for the use of a pathetic mule-driven cart.