Phone calls are notoriously expensive in Czech Republic. Despite the former communication monopoly is officially gone, the company still owns the landlines and you pay them high fixed monthly fees and high call rates. Fortunately, VoIP started to expand here recently.
I’ve already been using VoIP for some time, but only at the PC-to-PC level and it used to be full of software and network connection problems. But things get better and I start to use real VoIP services now. The choice of VoIP operators is wide and their prices are much better than with regular landlines or mobile phones.
My first experience was with 802.VOX. They are cheap but AFAICT they are incompetent as well. After using the service with common Linux clients I discovered several problems with their SIP implementation. For instance, they ignore declining calls or they create From: headers in an invalid format. Simply they don’t conform to RFC 3261 and that is not something I’m willing to use as a paid service.
After looking elsewhere I registered to ha-loo for my personal use. ha-loo is not as cheap as 802.VOX, but it is not expensive too and they offer several nice features which make the operator unique among Czech VoIP operators: No monthly fees (including disguised monthly fees such as credit expiration), low initial required credit, free regular phone number, 1+1 billing, instant payment through Ebanka, both SIP and IAX2 are supported, a dedicated VoIP line to our network, and 1-hour trial number to test the service before you sign up. Let’s see, so far their services seem to work well.
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