For the longest time, calling internationally was super expensive, despite it still is in many situations when calling to mobile phones rather than “landline”, calling to the PSTN was never on the cheap side.
This changed in some places of the world, e..g. with call-by-call phone providers that would append in front of the country code, making calls to abroad from Germany really affordable at the end of the 90’s, and eventually for the whole world when Skype became the first mainstream and easy to use VoIP service, that also included Unlimited World subscriptions, even including some cellular destinations like China and USA.
In most cases, people would use credits top-ups for destinations not covered by the subscription, this however changes in December last year, when Skype announced, it would shut down manual top-ups of Skype Credits. For whatever reason, as of February this year, the function for auto-recharge if the balance is under a certain low, appears to have been re-enabled (for existing users at least).
The most prominent VoIP provider in Germany, i.e. “Sipgate” and their free basic option, was a real model to the change of the situation on the VoIP market.
It discontinued the free basic (German) – pay as you go via credit – model for new users
So what did I do when I wanted to call the Domain Provider Reg.AM which doesn’t use a Yerevan city coded number for their customer support line but a 60-premium number? I have tried out Viber by Rakuten, which seems to be a direct competitor to Skype and most preferably used in the Baltic regions of the world – plus they include support for calling those 60-premium numbers which are meant to be only dialed within Armenia itself.
Why would I even bother you ask? Because in life, especially when dealing with business abroad, sometimes they don’t reply to email or What’s App messages, then more often than not, giving them a ring in a traditional phone conversation is the snappiest, easiest, more convenient and sometimes even only to find resolution to a problem.
I find big shame in the new direction the major industry leaders for PSTN and mobile calls in the VoIP industry are going, it is not a good trend, and there is hope competitors who still put their customer first came to stay a bit longer or even forever?