When it comes to making international calls, let's agree that telcos have really expensive calling rates.
One of the option is to use the voice over IP solutions, however, it requires a lot of planning from both the parties -- from setting up a time to actually checking whether your mic is working. Hangouts on Android can actually solve a bunch of these issues if it also allowed one to just initiate a voice call instead of a video call.
I have compared three services that allows you make calls from your desktop or smartphone app to anyone with a cell phone or PSTN phone.
Couple of observations:
- There's no clear cut winner when it comes to making international calls. That is, if you want to make calls to multiple destination and want to enjoy the best price, you'll have to keep switching between the apps
- In all the countries that I looked for, Skype turned out to the costliest. Besides that, Skype offers way too many options to the consumers and thus confusing them. Almost every plan has some sort of conditions attached to it
- Viber Out seems to be providing consistently best plans for most of the countries. If you have to buy credits from just one country, you cannot go wrong with Viber
Obviously, the trick here is to research on various services and pick up the best on that suits you. However, if you need to call up multiple destination and don't want to bother with buying credits from different services, Viber Out would be the clear cut choice.
So which international calling service are you using?
