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Comment by koopajah | Hacker News Reader

For me Viber is great because I live in another country so I can send/receive text/pictures/call easily to most of my family as if I was still living there. And for them it is just a matter of installing either Viber or Whatsapp and then everything works almost the same. Facebook messenger or skype or others are harder to use mostly because you need to create an account and always have it connected, etc.

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Same here. Cross-border calls are still unreasonably expensive without Viber/Skype. Is it there some limitation to the GSM infrastructure that prevents cheap international calls from ever becoming a reality, or are the phone companies just trying to milk us?

Some new rules are supposed to take action in Europe and end roaming charges and has been discussed before [1][2] so this might help a lot when it is in place

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5892957 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6339434

> or are the phone companies just trying to milk us?

This one. I used to have a mobile phone plan with Skype rates for international calls. Then it was discontinued.

Out of interest, have you tried upptalk?

I have never heard of this one before but you seem to target US/Canada users (at least for the free part) which is not my case (European).

Also multiplying the apps make everything harder, already teaching most of my family to use/update/check Viber was a long process especially remotely so I prefer to stay on what works fine for now!

We also do free calls for German, Spanish and UK users.

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