It is massively frustrating and a big downside to living here. I taught my elderly parents how to use Skype which was a reassurance to all of us when I moved out years ago. I'm not going to now retrain them on some stupid local service that is barely available in the UK to even download. I have found a loophole however - the EK VPN they use for us to get on the network wherever we are actually works with facilitating Skype - you just need to use the web based version to log in and it goes through pretty well.