What's the cheapest way to make International calls from Croatia?

mouseclick

Hi, I have a friend in Croatia, originally from UK and comes back here occasionally. She has broadband access at home in Croatia, and a Croatian mobile phone (+38).

She currently spends LOTS of money on calls to other countries from her mobile - for example Dubai, China, UK. She needs to take incoming calls as well.

We speak via MSN messenger voice chat for free, we both have Skype as well.

For a quick fix I was going to let her use my Tesco webphone from her laptop, she can download the software and I can give her my user id and pw, it comes with a UK number so she can take incoming too. I never use the thing. I only got it because it was so cheap. I even have a USB handset which she can have if she wants, when she's back in UK.

The above quick fix will give her fairly cheap UK calls but I haven't checked Tesco's international rates. I guess she could get a Skype in number as well, not forgetting http://www.quidco.com/skype/ - I am sure Skype do good deals.

In the long term it would be good if she could make cheap outgoing calls from her mobile as well. A very nice option would be to make outgoings from a VOIP account on the laptop that displays her mobile number as the calling number, is this possible these days? Second best option is a VOIP service that diverts to mobile when the laptop is off. I suppose an answering service would do as well, at a push. And of course there is the possibility of getting an International SIM card, though this may not be ideal as I think there are probably cheaper callback services these days.

I am a bit rusty on cheap calls as I just use my orchid dialer at home and I get free mobile calls, so thought I would ask here for any good pointers. Thanks in advance...

jinkssick

Skype yep, only way. Unless theres a cheap call overiders IN croatia.

redux

jinkssick wrote: »

Skype yep, only way. Unless theres a cheap call overiders IN croatia.

She can use any of thousands of VoIP companies.

Many have their own PC software client , while there are some independent softphones that can have almost any account settings in them. Calls between 2 VoIP accounts can be free even between different brands, and just about always on the same one. And several have callback services with various call trigger methods.

Read the VoIP discussion thread at the top to get some more background

Maybe go for one of the Betamax brands such as Voipcheap or Justvoip. They also allow calls via an access number, and there is one in Croatia

Lancastrian

Have a look at Callserve. Works from anywhere in the world unless the local phone company puts a block on the site, like the UAE (Dubai). It has saved me a fortune when calling Oman. Dubai 11p/min !

mouseclick

Thanks all. We have since discovered that Croatia charges £1 a gig for anything over 3 gig. So even skype to skype is not free,

Not the end of the world, but we have now resorted to MSN voice chat. It is lower bandwidth, apparently. Quality still good though. She uses skype when calling UK phones.

Skype was using around 16 kiloBYTES per second, I think. MSN less, when I looked it up.

Anyone know a low bandwidth VOIP provider?