I also live in the NE and the ATT service where I am at is terrible. That is why I dropped them and never looked back. Since I am on Verizon I needed a 2nd phone for international. I only use the phone for talking so my presepective may be different, for Internet service I use the hotel or my local office (if hotel is not free).

What I have been doing is buying prepaid SIM cards. I just came back from a week in Singapore all call to the US everyday multiple times and never used all of the initial cost (20 SGD). What you need to do is check to see if the carrier has a low cost dialing option. In the case of SinTel it was 019 dialing this reduced the cost significantly. So for about 14 USD I made 30 or so calls back to the US.

IMHO, this is the way to go.