Making International Calls to China

July 27, 2010

Using a BananaCall plan, you will be able to achieve great savings on your international calls to any phone destination in China. This happens because when dialing with a phone card, your call is routed in order to achieve a smaller rate per minute. The call quality, however, remains the same as for a direct call, but you end up paying considerably less.

When you want to use your BananaCall plan to call China, you'll need to know a few things about dialing this country from your location. To begin with, make sure that you're calling at a decent hour. China's time zone is GMT/UTC + 8, so be sure to determine the local time before placing your calls. You probably don't want to wake up whoever you're calling in the middle of the night with your phone call.

After this, you may use your calling plan to place calls to any phone in China. The dialing process is rather simple once you get the hang of it, and you can also use the special features that BananaCall provides to all its users (Speed Dial, Hot Dial, Automatic Recharge, etc).

Here are the steps you'll need to follow (when none of the options above is activated on your card):

1. Dial the access number that was given to you when you received your calling card (via email); alternatively, for greater savings, you can use a Local Access Number;
2. Enter the PIN number (unless you're using PINless dialing);
3. When prompted, enter the destination number in international format, as follows:
   011 (exit code) + 86 (China's international code) + Area Code + Phone Number

To determine which area code you need to dial, you'll need to know the city in which the person you're calling is located. Unless of course you already have the destination number with the area code included.

In order to determine the area code yourself, here are the dialing codes for China's cities: