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Tired of buying prepaid phone cards or paying stratospheric roaming charges when you phone home from away? A new service, Call-in-Europe, provides travelers with a French phone number and SIM card for use with an unlocked GSM tri-band cellphone. After hookup, calls are billed monthly at 29 cents a minute incoming and 69 cents a minute outgoing from Europe to the U.S. and Canada. The system works in many countries outside Europe, though calls are charged as if made from France.

I tried it on a recent trip (I already have a suitable cell so I didn't need to rent one from Call-in-Europe for 99 cents per day), and paid a $29 base fee, plus $18 to express mail the start-up kit to me in Brussels. The kit included a SIM card and easy-to-follow instructions, though I had to phone Call-in-Europe to get a PIN. The service worked flawlessly in Belgium and France. My December bill of $61.10 covered 25 calls, including a five-minute conversation from Paris to L.A., and was generally lower than my monthly bill for my international calling service. You can have calls to your home cellphone number automatically transferred to your Call-in-Europe number, and the system is compatible with a BlackBerry, smart phone or PDA. Info: (877) 730-5305, europe.com">www.callineurope.com.

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