Thanks for taking the time to read a little more about us. The site has four main areas that we dip in to; phone cards, roaming sim cards, world time zones and dialing codes. It's difficult to know which to talk about first. The most novel and complex function is the phone card price comparison tool, so we'll go with that first.

The phone card industry complicates prices to an extent that borders on corruption. Often companies hide the true cost of cards. Even companies with good intentions may find they have to disguise their prices in order to compete. A large phone card supplier is currently under investigation for exactly this. Phone card company under investigation article. This is a common story. Most phone card companies complicate prices and Ofcom, the regulatory body, is trying to eradicate this practice. Our phone card price comparison tool is the solution for both these companies and consumers. We show all the fees clearly and calculate the true cost of the cards for given specifications, enabling companies to compete fairly and customers to choose easily. It is the only tool of its kind.

The roaming sim cards comparison tool is like the phone cards tool but it compares roaming sim cards. There are similar tools but none that compare the cost of calling, including fees like the connection fee. The others just compare the rate per minute giving an inaccurate view of who is cheapest.

We are working with more companies to get their cards on our price comparison tools. We use a variety of methods to import data including writing web bots to crawl their sites. The method we use is different for each company.

Our paid data providers for world time zones are so good we do not have to do any research in this area at the country and region level (we class regions as US states for example). We always show the correct time to within a second or two. The server is synchronised with an atomic clock and the two second error margin takes into account page loading time. We make no attempt to synchronise the time displayed after the page is requested as we don't believe it is necessary. The ticking clock keeps in time using your computer's system clock. Of course daylight saving times are taken into account. We update our data as country officials and press provide our data providers with up and coming changes.

We are unique in the information we provide at the city level. Other sites will display time zones and international dialing codes for countries and regions and maybe a limited number of area codes. We go a step further by providing, for example, the 2 area codes in Cold Spring Harbour, New York not just the 14 or so area codes for the state of New York. We do this for most countries in the world. Tennessee like many regions has 2 time zones; we display the correct time at the city level for multi time zone regions.

We have over 39,000 area codes from 182 countries in our database (more than anyone else, as far as we know) collected from various sources. The area codes for the US are from a paid source and are updated quarterly. When a city is moving from one area code to another, we will display the new area code. As for the rest of the world, our task consists of collecting data from many disparate sources and putting it together in one place. A free resource that is particularly useful is the MaxMind world city database. This helps us to map areas to regions. For detecting a user's location we use a free IP to country database from WebNet77. This allows us to select a visitor's country as the origination when they view a page. We also must mention the world telephone numbering guide, another great source.

So we hope you like the site and find it useful. If you do, that's great, send us an email. If not or you find an error or have news of an update, then send us two. We really like hearing from you.

Thanks for visiting.