AT&T, Skype, Phonecard or other?

If you are an international student like me, or you have family members or friends in other countries or states, how will you choose to communaticate with them? Traditional telephone service providers such as AT&T and Mediacom? Cingular? Or you want to use Skype to make a phone call?
Or you want to use some instant chatting tools such as MSN and ICQ, with the web camera and earset to communicate with your family and friends? Or their a new service provide the long-distance phone service using the internet which connect the phone with internet and charge some money each month wherever you call is free?
I think the first thing we wanna consider of is the price. How much we will pay for one service. For my experience, I am using the traditional telephone service provided by AT&T without any long-distance or interational call service. The regular service fee is about $21 per month, and I am buying calling cards from http://www.sinocalling.com which sells calling card for all over the world. Usually $20 can buy 600 minutes to call china using the toll-free number, if can call the local access code, you can get more minutes. This is th etraditional telephone service with callin card.
How about Skype? According to the Skype official website http://www.skype.com/, they have a plan called Skype Unlimited which you can call in the US and Canada with $29.95 per year. And one can also choose from the various plans such as Skypein, Skypeout, and etc. So you can choose one suitable for you. They also has the callin rate to each country. See the website http://www.skype.com/products/skypeo...all_rates.html. The only thing is you have one computer with internet connection, and download the Skype.
And talking about the newest phone service which one can call phone numbers via internet. This kind of phone use cable instead of telephone line. It is about $25 per month with unlimited calls inside or outside US. But the pre-request is you have internet connection.
So what is your opinion?
Which one you would choose? Traditional telephone service? Skype via peer-to-peer Internet telephony network? Or the new internet callin phone? Or you have some new idea?

To start with, I am an international student originally from India, been here for little over a year now. I enjoyed the post as it contained information on various ways of staying connected with friends and family living outside the United States.

Well, I would like to comment on the post from two perspectives. Firstly, assuming that a student uses a computer to stay connected with family and friends through Skype or instant chatting tools like MSN, Gtalk, Yahoo messenger etc.,. which provide an option to video chat. Whereas, it certainly has its own disadvantages like not being handy. On the other hand, using a calling card from a phone might sound attractive as it is handy and provide with an option for multitasking like you could stay over the phone as you drive, cook, play etc.,. Similar to other companies, reliablecom.com has made calling to India as low as 1c/min.

From my point of view, I would just prefer speaking to my loved ones more often than using a video chat.