How to Perform International Calling on a Cell Phone
- 1). Obtain the full international number for your overseas contact. Be sure to request the country and city codes in addition to the person's actual number. If your contact does not know this information, you can look up these codes online by searching for "international calling codes" and selecting the country you are trying to call from the provided lists.
- 2). Contact your carrier to ensure that the proper permissions are in place. For some companies, the ability to make international calls is not an inherently granted privilege. This is a courtesy to prevent customers from racking up a horrendously large phone bill without understanding the costs involved with international calling. Ask the representative to confirm that you have international dialing permissions enabled on your line.
- 3). Replace the "011" international dialing prefix with a "+" instead. Cell phones utilize the plus sign instead of the traditional prefix, so many people encounter errors when attempting to make a call overseas. Follow the "+" with the country code, city code and your recipient's phone number.
- 4). Confirm the number if the call does not go through successfully. International calls require you to input many digits, and it is quite easy to accidentally miss a digit or transpose two of the numbers. If the number checks out as correct based on what was given to you by your foreign contact, confirm that the country and city codes given to you are valid. There are several online international dialing code databases that you can use to do this. Simply look up the country and city of your contact and compare that to the number given to you.
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