Not really.
But just for fun. Let’s say there’s a gal in Chicago anxious to play a cruel practical joke on her pal. Let’s say the pal is going out of town for the weekend and the gal has access to her phone.
What’s the MOST EXPENSIVE phone call I could place from Chicago, (not comparing long distance plans or anything, just in the ballpark)
is there a phone in Antartica? And is that how you spell Antarctica? Antarctica…Antartica…
The icy place.
jarbaby
You little brat!! Good idea. 
Try and look for really tiny islands in the Pacific, or in Asia. They tend to be really expensive because of overhead costs: the more people share a satellite connection, the cheaper it is to maintain it per head.
Uh… you ARE going to pay her back, right?
Nah…I’m just going to call Time and Temperature for Tierra Del Fuego and leave her phone off the hook 
This is all hypothetical of course.
Maybe now she’ll think twice before calling me a ‘republican idiot’
jarbaby
AFAIK, the most expensive places to call are not geographic areas, but satellite phones. Try getting someone’s Iridium portable-satellite-phone number (country code +881 6) or Inmarsat marine satellite number (+870, +871, +872, +873, +874) for ships at sea.
Phones on planes are also expensive; I think they go by satellite as well. The most expensive phone call price I have ever seen was the in-flight phone on the KLM jet I came back from Europe on: USD 5.60 per thirty seconds. Yipe. But I don’t know whether you can make calls to the plane.
Maybe you vould try to call the International Space Station… 
Or a sex line in Montserrat.
geographical distance has nothing to do with it. A call to China is way more expensive than a call to Taiwan or Hong Kong. Today the actual cost has very little to do with distance and everything to do with taxes and politics. China taxes incoming calls as a way of putting taxes on foreigners and also as a way of discouraging communications with the outside. HK does not have the same problem.
Can I borrow her phone to call Anniz in Sweden?
I have to agree that politics is an important consideration. Monopolistic phone companies run by third-world governments or the cronies of those in power will charge as much as they can get away with. However, geographic isolation and low technology are also an important factor. I didn’t have much trouble finidng a commercial site that advertises its international rates. If this company is representative, the highest rates are (per minute):
More than $4
Vanatau
More than $1.70 but less than $4
Western Samoa
Somalia
Myanman
Senegal
More than $1.40 but less than $1.70
Seychelles
Guinea-Bissau
Mongolia
Eritrea
Alrighty! The Vanatau Dairy Queen it is
jarbaby
If you can’t find Vanatau, try Vanuatu (the American spelling).
I really hesitate to mention this, but if the entire idea is to run up a large “per minute” charge, what about calling one of those 900 numbers (not necessarily porn, but then, why not)?
When I was young and even stupider than I am now, my friend was given a number to call by another of his friends. Yeah, it was an adult line. One of his idiot friends [sub]OK, it was me[/sub] said "I wonder what would happen if you called the “next number over” instead (ie, add one to the previous number).
We did, and it was great fun. Stock updates, sports betting tips, more adult fun…lots of great stuff.
'Course, when I found out these were all toll calls, I avoided going over to my friend’s house (and him in general) for weeks. Never did find out how that played out.
Just make a phone call using AT&T’s calling cards. I have a $500 for about 20 minutes worth of calls from Europe. In comparison, I had talked for hours on a £20 phone card in London while I was studying there. ATT told my mother that they had switched our rate to something cheap, but when I got home… surprise! Fuckers. Sorry, this is turning into a rant. Better quit.
you could also try calling a ship cruising in any of the oceans…they use satellite phones, i think, so it is prohibitively expensive…
anyone tried setting up a phone service on the moon ? i mean what fun it would be to call up that armstrong chap and say, “hey, can you set it right for mankind once 'n fer all, dude ? what is it that you actually said ?”
[slight hijack] Hey Sunspace! I work for a satphone company! What’re you tryin’ to do? Drive us out of business? If people hear that its expensive to call those things, they won’t be buying them from us! The exorbitant airtime rates pay my salary! Stop it! [/slight hijack]
An article I read one time dealt with a guy who told his live-in girlfriend that he was going away on a business trip for 3 weeks and wanted her gone when he got back. He came home and the only unusual thing he saw was that the phone was off the hook. He picked it and heard a strnage voice saying something he couldn’t understand. He hung up and thought no more about it until he got his bill. It was for $30,000! It seems his ex had called time and tempature in Japan and left the phone off the hook for a very long time!
Costs different between locations:
When i was in New Delhi the hotel charged me (unbeknownst to me)5.50 us per minute with a 25% luxury charge.
After a week my phone bill was over $900 US.
One call from a hotel in Vanuatu (correct spelling) to Hong Kong cost A$1200 (us$600, gbp #450 approx) for 30 mins. Calls from a household phone where not much better, my monthly bill while living there in late 1999 would always top 200k vatu (A$3000 approx).
Iridium’s not so expensive as it once was, no? As a Canadian, I live in a country that has millions of square kilometres that will never see land-based cellular. Or more than a dozen people a year, for that matter.
But there are locations less than 4 hours drive from Toronto that have no cellular service of any sort whatsoever, and probably never will. My sister and brother-in-law are long-distance truckers, and they travel through areas north of Sault Ste Marie that barely have roads, let alone cellular. I thought that a satphone would be great for their truck, but that I found out how much the pre-bankruptcy Iridium cost.
Perhaps Iridium’s less expensive now. I thought that Inmarsat was the really expensive one anyways… are the satellite receivers that look like suitcases, like the one in Contact, for Inmarsat?
Canada is ideally suited for satphones. I want one that also does all four of the the GSM bands (800, 900, 1800, 1900) so I can use it in Toronto and Europe less expensively, and also does AMPS analogue for rural Canada…
Sunspace, yeah, Iridium’s nowhere near as expensive as it once was. Airtime’s down to around $1.50 (US) a minute, which is cheap considering that it was around $7 (US) (Inmarsat’s about $4 more with Internet capability at 64K, so why would you buy an Iridium at that price?) before they went under. Haven’t seen Contact, so I can’t say for certain, but Inmarsat phones are generally suitcased shaped. Of course, there maybe some kind of military sat system we don’t know anything about. (Kind of doubt it, though, as an awful lot of our phones go out to the military guys.) Actually, Canada is ideally suited for only certain sat phones. Once you get really far north, its a pain to get a signal on an Inmarsat phone, and if you’re on the north slope of a mountain, you can forget about the Inmarsat working. I don’t know if you can get a satphone that handles all the cellbands you’re talking about. We only carry one (Globalstar) that has cell capability (Iridium’s dumped theirs and isn’t planning on redoing it anytime soon.), and I don’t know off the top of my head if its got GSM or not. Don’t think so. If you can find an Iridium phone made by Kyocera, you can have a satphone with GSM cellular as the Kyocera model’s basically a cell phone with an Iridium unit grafted on the back. The problem with those are Kyocera’s not supporting them, so if the battery goes bad or something else goes wrong, you’re SOL. They also have the old software, which means you’re more likely to have your call dropped. We have one of those in stock and won’t be getting any more. E-mail me if you’re interested and we’ll discuss it.
If I had my moderator hat off, I’d give you many creative suggestions. But wait, did you say you’re a… Republican??
Anyway, the practical joker in me feels really bad about this, but I think nuff answers have been given and it’s time to get back to discussions of the physics of black holes and the ingredients in Cheez Whiz.