I see this topic has been mentioned in several previous posts, but
since the problem persists I want to add my two cents worth.  When
travelling outside the user's home area Verizon Wireless FreeUp
prepaid service requires that the user dial a number twice.  To make
matters worse, the second time the user dials, he/she must dial it by
hand, not from the phone's stored contact list or speed dial numbers.
From my experiments this problem exists whether or not the number is
stored in my dialing directory with a 1 before the area code or not.

This was true even though the screen on my handset showed that I was
connected to a Verizon transmitter, not to that of a competitor.  The
most plausible explanation of this that I have seen is this post
within this newsgroup:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=g0ta5vk3hmpc
sutnc2hrtdgsh605jg3od0%404ax.com&rnum=2&prev=/groups%3Fq%3DVerizon%2BFreeUp%2Bdi
al%2Btwice%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26hl%3Den%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch

I complained about this to FreeUp customer service.  They confirmed
that this is a problem, and vaguely said that they thought that
Verizon is working on a solution, but had no idea when a solution
would become available.  Since I see from this newsgroup that there
have been complaints about this for over two years, one wonders how
much of a priority Verizon is giving this.

It's a shame that they allow this major inconvenience to exist, since
most other aspects of the FreeUp service (pricing, performance) are
quite good.  Could it be that they intentionally want this problem to
remain to goad users into upgrading to more expensive plans?  I'd
expect this from some of their previously monopolistic competitors,
but not from Verizon.

I can't imagine that their system programmers couldn't find a way to
capture and store the first number dialed, then have their system
reuse it to dial the number on the user's home network.  Perhaps this
couldn't be done if the user is accessing a competitor's network out
of area, but it certainly must be possible if the network being
accessed is Verizon's own.

At the very least, Verizon should give the user the ability to dial a
short code number* then use their normal dialing directory (contacts
list) to dial the number.  Not being able to dial automatically on the
second try is the major usability problem when using FreeUp away from
home.

* (There is an existing short cut to dial the first number: I was able
to just dial the number 1 + Call, to satisfy the requirement for the
first dialing attempt.)