For about 10 months in 2007, my brother was living The Gambia, a small country in western Africa. I would attempt to call him at least once a week to hear about the various goings on of his life there. Needless to say that, as a student, I would use an international calling card in order to do this. I had never used calling cards previous to this, so I wasn t really sure which brand to get. After staring at the many charts on the wall of the store where I bought the card for what I was sure was far too long, I decided on a particular card because it had the best rates for the country I was trying to call. In The Gambia, two consequences of poverty and corruption are frequent power outages and poor telephone networks in the neighborhoods that are not as well off as others. Therefore, anytime I would try and call my brother, it would normally take at least two or three attempts to make any sort of connection, and even then there would usually be a delay of at least two seconds. Some days, I would try and try and the all that would happen was that after a few minutes the line would just go dead, others I would hear him but he could not hear me. What I didn t realize until I had spent half of a $20 calling card without ever speaking with my brother, was that there was a connection fee for every call and it occasionally considered the half-connections and bad network loops I d get lost in as speaking time. This was obviously why it had the lowest rates for that country.