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Skype Offering SkypeOut Service for Free

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Mon May 15, 2006 10:41 PM
from the get-em-hooked dept.
Communications Businesses
Skudd writes "In an effort to boost new customer acquisition, Skype has begun offering its 'SkypeOut' service for free. The free service is slated to last until December 31, 2006." From the article: "While the SkypeOut service will allow free calling to regular phones, the company will continue to charge people to get calls using a service it calls SkypeIn, which costs about $38 for an unlimited 12-month subscription. Consumers can get the service for three months for about $12.80."
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  • Not For Everyone (Score:4, Informative)

    by Red Pointy Tail (127601) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:46PM (#15339924)
    Note to submitters/editors: Not everyone lives in US/Canada.

  • Looking Forward To... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SlashdotOgre (739181) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:48PM (#15339932) Journal
    I'm looking forward to calling my current land line provider, AT&T, and tell them I'm switching because of their choice to hand over phone records to the NSA. I'm sure VoIP won't be much more secure, but I hope if enough people do this they get the message.
    • You forget one important landline feature you want to keep. SkypeOut can't dial 911.

      Love SkypeOut, but it has serious limitations.

      • Re:Looking Forward To... (Score:4, Informative)

        by tapo (855172) on Monday May 15 2006, @11:07PM (#15340018) Homepage
        By U.S. law, even a disconnected phone line is able to dial 911.
        • By U.S. law, even a disconnected phone line is able to dial 911.

          Tell BellSloth that. I haven't had a landline in years and yet none of the BellSloth-serviced locations I've lived in has had a dialtone or 911 access.

        • Most landlines are powered. So they still work during power outages - cell phones don't... as long as you don't have a phone that otherwise depends on electricity.

          That alone is worth the cash.

          • Problem is that technically VOIP is NOT a phone service.

            Phone in most (all?) countries are goverened by a strict set of regulations regarding billing, level of service etc. etc.

            VOIP on the other hand is a novelty application for the internet and
            is not geverned by any regulations and cannot paricipate in many regulated
            telephone services. The problem with 911,999,912,914 type services is
            that the service provider is supposed to supply subscriber details and
            location details to the emergency operator. "133t5ax0r

  • Only to the US and Canada... (Score:4, Informative)

    by NemosomeN (670035) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:52PM (#15339945) Journal
    One of Skype's biggest perks is cheap international calling. Submitter sucks, should have put that in the summary. It's in the fucking article's title, fps.

  • New partnership? Something else? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sosarian (39969) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:52PM (#15339946) Homepage
    Did Skype suddenly form a new partnership with someone to handle these calls?

    Or is this some sort of grab for customers so that they can have more P2P nodes?

    Just some initial thoughts.

  • The AOL of VOIP (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zemran (3101) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:53PM (#15339951) Homepage Journal
    Skype is the AOL of VOIP and they are desperate to get everyone into their camp before people realise that they can have the world if they stay outside of that camp. True VOIP offers you the same freedom that the real internet offers those that are/were not AOL subscribers. I have a dial in line for free on VOIP and I can dial out for free already. I can call many countries for free. I do not need a restricted cobbled service just because it has a good marketing department.
    • Please name this magical service that we in the unwashed masses may also benefit.

      • Re:The AOL of VOIP (Score:5, Informative)

        by Zemran (3101) on Monday May 15 2006, @11:03PM (#15340001) Homepage Journal
        For my UK incoming number I use www.sipgate.com
        For my US incoming number I use www.sipphone.com

        For outgoing calls I use www.voipbuster.com (they also offer an incoming number but I already had one)
        www.voipcheap.com or www.voipcheap.co.uk (same stuff really).

        I have a Sipura ATA so I do not even need to have my computer turned on to make or recieve calls. You can get other ATAs and I do not think the Sipura is the best but I bought it 3 years ago when it was.

        BTW I live in northern Thailand and with this I can call and chat to my friends as much as I like.
      • With a true SIP provider you can call any other SIP phone regardless of physical location on the planet. The SIP protocol allows you to simply dial a SIP address and talk to that person. The quality of service is down to your provider and just like AOL, Skype do tend to provide a reasonable service. The problem is that with Skype you can only talk to other Skype phones, it is not open, just like AOL was not open. If you go to a good SIP povider you can have a good clear call and have a better breakout d
  • It's only guaranteed until the end of 2006. So most likely it's one those things to get people hooked on using the service and more willing to pay the charges after this year. But hey, the business model works for drug dealers. Once you get addicted to the sample drug, you'll be a long-term customer.

    Conspiracy theory: The reason is free is because it's funded by the NSA, that way they won't need to ask anyone for phone records. Shhhhhhhhhhh

  • Huh. (Score:4, Informative)

    by AWhiteFlame (928642) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:56PM (#15339963) Homepage
    Just tried calling my cell phone on it from my old Powerbook G4 Ti @ 500 Mhz with OS X Tiger. Works -excellently-. No activation or anything needed to my account. Downloaded latest version, ran it, and it worked right "out of the box".

  • This offer is valid until..... (Score:3, Informative)

    by allaunjsilverfox2 (882195) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:56PM (#15339967) Homepage Journal
    December 31, 2006. After that, They are unsure of what they are going to do. I remember a company called dialpad years ago that did something similar, except in reverse, they started out giving unlimited free calling to anyone. Then they cut it down to 10 minutes, 5 minutes, then 1 minute and then they were forced to shut down because no one would subscribe. I'm sure this isn't the case with Skype but given they're past record I'm not sure this is a good idea.
  • I already have a cellphone that has enough monthly minutes that, for as little as I use the phone, it might as well just be unlimited. And I can take it with me anywhere, too.

    Nonetheless, it's kind of neat making these free phone calls with Skype and hearing the people's voices come out of my computer speakers.

    Have to see if I can get through to Dial-a-Song [dialasong.com] at 718-387-6962. Now it's free if I call from home as well as work...

  • This is useless. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by natrius (642724) <[niran] [at] [niran.org]> on Monday May 15 2006, @11:05PM (#15340009) Homepage
    Almost everyone who has a cell phone has free domestic long distance. This sounds like an amazing offer, but it's giving people nothing they didn't have before. It might get a few more people to actually try Skype, but the practical uses of this offer are almost nonexistent.
    • Almost everyone who has a cell phone has free domestic long distance. This sounds like an amazing offer, but it's giving people nothing they didn't have before. It might get a few more people to actually try Skype, but the practical uses of this offer are almost nonexistent.

      I have a cell phone and planned to use only it when I moved into this apartment, but the service is very unreliable here. Calls drop all the time. Then I got Vonage, which was good for several months, but then went downhill. Now I have

    • free domestic long distance

      What's that thing you get in the mail each month from your provider? A donation request? The cheapest cell phone plans anymore run $40 for 750 anytime minutes and unlimited nights and weekends, if you're lucky. I pay $15/mo for 150 anytime minutes on my cell phone, but that's a rare exception (threatening to leave after being a customer for 2-3 years works wonders sometimes). I also pay $15/mo for 500 minutes with Vonage (and a very low rate after that such that I would need t

  • I've been using SkypeOut for quite some time now. I first purchased SkypeOut credit in Oct. 2004. My main motivation has been that my brother lives in Beijing and I live in Toronto. But I also talk with other family and friends quite regularly using the feature. One thing I've noticed: my connection and audio quality tend to be better to when I'm talking to my Brother in Beijing than when I'm talking to my wife while I'm travelling in the US. Skype has gradually become more and more important in my suite of communication tools. I'd much rather Skype someone than email them. I used to use Yahoo! messenger and ICQ quite a bit. I've completely stopped. Maybe they've improved, but Skype's conference call/chat feature has been extremely helpful. I did an hour-long 3-way business call between Toronto, Baltimore and London in the UK for only a few dollars!

    All that said, there's a problem too: I've been using it on my laptop and it means carrying around a headset with a microphone. The built-in mic is terrible. For anyone adopting Skype as a phone replacement (which it sill isn't for me), this is an important consideration. The big "discount" they are giving with free SkypeOut in North America will probably help adoption here a little, but I'm not convinced it will make a really big splash. I think they need to figure out a nice way to integrate with a cell-phone-like headset that still works through one's computer/laptop or on one's wireless LAN. This would be the item that would allow me to get rid of my home/office phones.

  • I do a lot of work with Asterisk and have investigated pricing on inbound and outbound rates to such an extent that it would be considered obsessive.

    With most VoIP, inbound call phone numbers are at least as expensive to get as outbound when you get to any kind of volume. I'm not talking about 1 line for a few bucks, or a few test lines at fixed cost, but the ability to just recieve a bunch of calls at once on a phone number. It comes down to about $18 (US) for the ability to recieve each concurrent inbound call. You can get unlimited at a penny or two per minute per call, but that ends up being more expensive if you do good pooling with a fixed number of lines. Outbound can be as little as half that.

    Where is the cost in all this? The cost is the connection to the copper based system. At some point, somewhere, someone has to get paid for a link to that big addressing system.

    The sick part is, most of the big telcos are doing voip any way, and their ability to hold onto that master address space is the key last item for them to hold the power to charge what they do. ENID (including free systems) are functional -- and can work just like DNS -- but the providers wont use it.

    There's a system (ENID based, I believe) that would allow any number you dial from your regular phone or cell phone to be checked against a registry, and if a voip address is listed for it, the telco could bypass the entire infrastructure and route the call directly to the person you called over voip. So if I registered a voip address to my phone number (which I have done) and you called me from say, Verizon Wireless, they could route the call to me without going over a single bit of big telco as anything other than VoIP. No telco switching involved. It would bypass my per-minute inbound costs entirely other than my internet connection.

    It works if you call from a voip phone that knows about the registry (Asterisk based systems, for example can do this). The telcos and cell companies don't do it. Why not? As a whole, they make their money by controlling that master address -- the phone number.

  • Skype trying to reach performance goals ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by OneInEveryCrowd (62120) on Monday May 15 2006, @11:27PM (#15340110)
    It was mentioned [techcrunch.com] when ebay bought Skype that if Skype could achieve certain performance goals that the deal would be worth an extra 1.5 billion dollars. It looks like the number of users in North America may be one of these performance goals.

    Also this is a good way to compete with Yahoo! Messenger, which was recently upgraded to use the same voice codec [globalipsound.com] as skype.

  • Skype & Security (Score:5, Informative)

    by Robotech_Master (14247) on Monday May 15 2006, @11:39PM (#15340141) Homepage Journal
    Just to note, there are a few security concerns [slashdot.org] about Skype, its ownership by eBay, and potential security holes within the Skype network [wikipedia.org]. Be aware of what you're using when you're using it.

    • Hogwash (Score:3, Interesting)

      by brunes69 (86786)
      And you think it is less secure than your home phone?

      I can tap your home phone remotely with 10 dollars of equpment from Radio Shack.

      Even if the data is totally unencrypted, it is orders of magnitude harder to tap someone's internet connection than their phone connection. Anyone can splice in a twisted pair to recieve all your incoming calls and attach a small RF transmitter with a few miles range, and odds are great that you would never even notice it, or the jack box on the side of your house. It is much

  • Nothing new but really nice anyway! (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2006, @11:42PM (#15340152)
    http://www.voipbuster.com/ [voipbuster.com]
    http://www.sipdiscount.com/ [sipdiscount.com]
    http://www.voipcheap.com/ [voipcheap.com]
    voipdiscount.com
    voipstunt.com ...

    gives... well... around 40 countries free! (well... you pay 10euros for 2 or 3 months and you can call a lot of countries for 0 cent/min or 1 cent/min)

    I use it a lot (with sjphone) and for this price... this is unbeatable! But for a good VOIP, you need a good High Speed Internet Access! A delay of 1 or 2 seconds and cause a hang up before you can even try to say "hello" ;-)

    sip compatible with any hardware SIP or softphone like sjPhone (mac, pc, linux, pda...)

    sip server: sip.voipbuster.com (port 5060)
    domain: voipbuster.com
    stun server: stun.voipbuster.com

    sip server: sip1.sipdiscount.com (port 5060)
    domain: sipdiscount.com
    stun server: stun.sipdiscount.com

    etc ;-)

  • Some Hidden Benefits (Score:3, Informative)

    by JackRazz (707629) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @12:15AM (#15340234)
    I've been using Skype for a couple of months with a mic/headset combo and it has been surprisingly good. One of the benefits of Skype is that you can make conference calls. This is something I've never done at home with a landline. I had $9 Skype-Out left and don't know how I'm gonna use it up now(-:

  • Works great, but -- XP SP2 patch required (Score:3, Informative)

    by orthogonal (588627) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @12:37AM (#15340304) Journal
    I just installed it and completed an hour long phone call to a landline. I used the cheap out-of-the-box microphone that came with my Dell, and my computer speakers (not headphones), just like a speakerphone.

    Worked beautifully. Neither I nor my friend had any problem hearing, and it didn't sound like a speaker phone all -- none of those typical speakerphone "click on/click off" noises at all. We could even both tallk at the same time, with both of us more-or-less audible. It was just about as if my friend was in the same room as me. (Some of the credit is probably due to my soundcard.)

    I did have a major CPU utilization problem with Skype until I uninstalled McAfee's firewall, which made the audio terrible. McAfee had long been disabled in favor of (the free, better, not reliant on IE and Active-X) Kerio, but I hadn't gotten around to removing it entirely. Once removed, no problem with Skype at all.

    Also, as I have Windows XP SP2, it was necessary to install this TCPIP.sys patch [lvllord.de] to get around Microsoft's "helpfulness".

  • I was able to test the free SkypeOut by calling my home phone from my PowerBook, but not without some difficulty. At first it wouldn't dial the number at all -- apparently you need to use a bit of a special incantation to get it to dial.

    On my first attempt, I tried to do a ten digit dial (xxx-xxx-xxxx), but it wouldn't let me dial out. So I next tried adding a 1 in front of the number (1-xxx-xxx-xxxx), but again, no-go.

    The trick? You must put a plus sign ('+') in front of the 1 (that is, dial "+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx"). Then it works just fine. But otherwise, it doesn't work at all -- the call button will be completely disabled.

    I wonder however if this won't be ripe for abuse. All Skype calls show up as being from 000-012-3456, and I just know there are some asshats out there who are going to start using this for obscene phone calls, or other negative abuses of the system.

    Anyhow, if you can't get your version of Skype to work, try it with the + symbol in front of the 1. On the latest Mac version at least, this is the only way it will work correctly.

    Yaz.

      • How would they know that they should call the US if you don't specify it?

        I'm not arguing that the country code shound't be required. That just makes sense. It's the plus symbol that is extraneous.

        And telephone numbers should always be stored with a + in front of it.

        Why? I've survived for several decades without doing this. Why has it suddenly become a requirement?

        Yaz.

  • What about the money already on my account? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mh101 (620659) on Tuesday May 16 2006, @12:46AM (#15340328)
    So what happens with the money that's already on my SkypeOut account? My current balance is only valid until Sept. 29, which is well before the Dec. 31 end of this offer.

    From their Terms Of Service page: "A credit balance for Skype Credit expires 180 days after the last chargeable use of the Skype Credit. Credit balances that are not used within the said 180 day period will be lost."(emphasis mine) I assume that means that free calls don't count as "chargable use" so even if I place SkypeOut calls every day for the next few months my money would still disappear at the end of September?

    If that's the case, looks like I'll be submitting a refund request. Don't misunderstand me - I'm definitely not complaining about free service, but if I end up losing all my current balance then it's not free.

    Now that I think about it, I wonder how many people will be burned by this and all these 'unused' balances will go straight into Skype's coffers.

    • Check this site out for other gripes concerning rogers.
      Telecom service companies need to go down. Communication companies should be charging what the service is WORTH.

      http://www.ihaterogers.ca/ [ihaterogers.ca]
    • It should be no surprise that different VOIP providers offer different levels of support, service and infrastructure.

      I don't know about rogers per se, but if Roger's voip is anything like what its counterpart Shaw is offering, it deserves to be more expensive, its run on a dedicated network, separate from their broadband internet service -- meaning it doesn't rely on your internet being up!

      This dedicated network is also independantly powered and with backup, right down to including a battery backup for your
    • No - I tried it today and it Just Works(TM).

    • Re:activation (Score:4, Informative)

      by BewireNomali (618969) on Monday May 15 2006, @10:58PM (#15339981)
      no. I didn't have to.

      I tested it by creating a new UID. The first two times I tried calling a friend's mobile phone, I got error messages. The third time and every time after was smooth sailing. The sound isn't the best, not cell phone quality, but it works. The number showed up as "000123456" on the recipient's phone, so its usefulness is limited; those who screen calls would likely not pick up, and since you can't get incoming on it without upgrading - well.

      If you have an outgoing number, I'm sure you can solve this issue by being issued an incoming number. IMO, it seems to be a loss leader of sorts, to get folks to upgrade to paid service.

    • I've never tried it, but I know some people who have attempted to use fax machines on other VoIP systems with mixed results. I believe the problem stems from the psychoacoustic compression (e.g.: G.729) that's used to reduce the bandwidth requirements of calls: it's very low bitrate and designed for speech only, and doesn't have anywhere near the data-carrying capacity of a standard POTS line.

      I think some VoIP systems (Vonage) are smart enough to increase the bandwidth so as to not block fax and data calls

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