Skype's Free Phone Call Plan Will Soon Have Annual Fee 171
The New York Times is reporting that Skype has said it would begin charging $30 a year for unlimited calls to landline and mobile phones within the United States and Canada. From the article: "As a promotion, Skype began allowing its users to place free domestic 'SkypeOut' calls from their computers to traditional and mobile phones last May. At the time, the company said the promotion would extend only through year's end. The company is offering a half-price subscription to those who sign up before Jan. 31. Calls from one computer to another have been and will continue to be free."
Why Skype ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Classic Marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
Erm...I guess (Score:3, Interesting)
I used the service prior to their promotion. It was cheap and worked as advertised (you might remember, since they had/have a Linux client they made
Anyway, I don't think this is a bait-and-switch if thats what you meant. Sounds like they are ending a very long promotion with a new promotion. Maybe I'll sign up (cell phone minutes! eek!).
And so it begins! (Score:1, Interesting)
Anyone remember when cable TV was ad free?
Re:Why Skype ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have no landline at home (been that way for more than 3 years now) and was using my cell phone with international calling cards to make phone calls oversea. But the connection generally was terrible in sound quality and there were intermittent signaling problems, too. On top of that, my mom has some hearing problem so that the sound quality was very important to us.
Now with skype, it's fairly easy for me to boost the signal from my laptop while making a phone call. She appreciates the clarity of voice (a bit of signal delay is present, though). It costs me less than what I used to pay with my calling card, too. Also it was very easy to install binary tar-ball onto my Debian system (took me less than a minute to install). The user base is fairly good, too, so that it's simple to look up whenever I have some technical problem with using the service.
I'm sure skype isn't for everyone; but if you are tech-savvy enough, it's not a bad substitute for other VOIP services.
Betamax are offering free calls to ~30 countries (Score:4, Interesting)
There are some quirks with Betamax though:
- They operate VoIP services under a dozen or so brand names and each brand has different rates. For an up-to-date comparison, see: http://backsla.sh/betamax [backsla.sh]
- They keep changing rates and the list of free countries, but the core countries tend to remain the same.
- To get free VoIP calls, you must top up 10 euros (+GST) every three or four months (depending on which of their brands you are using). Free calls are free calls - those 10 euros you can use for calling other, non-free, destinations. Also, credit does not expire so you can keep topping up until you finally have a use for all that credit (or the company folds
;).
- There is a limit on the amount of free calls - 300 minutes in a floating 7 day window, though they do not seem to be very exact about this. Sometimes, they screw up and charge for a supposedly free call (at a still impressive 1 cent a minute). But far more often than that, I end up calling for way over 300 minutes per week and still get charged nothing.
- They also offer a call-back service where you type in your phone number and the one you want to call. Both phones then ring and a connection is established between them. If both phones would have normally been free to call, this type of call is free as well. There is only a 5 cent or so set-up charge. A minor annoyance is that this gets charged even if the line on the other side is busy or nobody picks up.
- Finally, all calls get disconnected after one hour. My guess would be this is because with each free call you make, they are actually losing some money and they do not want to keep paying when people forget to properly hang up their phones...
All in all, I am topping up 10 euros (+GST) every few months, am calling family all over the world for free and get much better rates for mobiles and exotic destinations than I have ever seen from any other provider. I wouldn't know why I would ever consider SkypeIn + SkypeOut.This service is actually really handy at work, where SIP may not work due to firewall restrictions. You can still call out by having your office phone be called back.
Re:Ekiga better than Skype (Score:3, Interesting)
Can't call landlines, or have landlines call you. Personally, I use Skype to call landlines more than I call other Skype clients.
For the professional user, Ekiga is a non-starter.
Re:Classic Marketing (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah. Get an unlimited data plan on a smartphone, ditch the voice, and pay $68.00/year for the SkypeIn and SkypeOut service. Unlimited data *and* voice. Coverage area is smaller, but I could deal with that. Verizon might be pretty pissed, though, since I'd need a data connection active all the time so I could receive calls. Oh well...
Skype: Please make a Palm port of your software for the Treo! I don't want to be limited to a Windows Mobile device.
Re:Other services (Score:2, Interesting)
When you ask for "services" rather than protocols, you have already lost.
Why would anyone want a VOIP service? So that someone exists to whom you can pay every month? So that someone exists for the government to force to implement a MitM?
Death to VOIP services. The only service I want is extremely-generic application-agnostic IP service. The application that the packets represent, are nobody's business but the two people who have the session key.
Re:Now will be a regulated phone company (Score:3, Interesting)
Damned good station too.
If you're talking about CIMX (A.K.A. 89X), um no. Kudos to them for sticking it to the FCC, but the content is just more Clear Channel garbage crapping up the airwaves. Also, they're taking advantage of broadcasting out of a part of the spectrum that's normally reserved for non-profit and public stations in the US. Their obligation to the Canadian government? A couple hours of Canadian talk radio on weekend mornings long before anyone's out of bed. Once 6:50AM hits, 100% of their content is ad-infested American radio poo. I doubt Detroit/Windsor is the only place where this happens.
Sorry, did that come across as bitter and spiteful?
Re:Why Skype ? (Score:3, Interesting)
The real way to solve NAT issues is through centralization or upnp. If your computer pokes a hole through the firewall for skype theres a chance your computer will now be skypes 'super-node.' Phone calls for other people will be routed through you, using up your bandwidth. Instead of skype centralizing the process and routing them through some central authority or implementing unpnp, they are simply using users as phone p2p. Which is fine for a free service but when Im paying I dont want skype to also make money off my pc and internet connection.
Horrible quality on the "free" calls (Score:3, Interesting)
I've used Skype for almost two years now, and call quality to landlines has generally been good, at least acceptable. When I was in the States last June (I live in Ecuador), I made some free calls to my parents' landline and cell phone from a 3mb DSL connection. It sucked rocks! We could barely understand each other. Calling the very same number from the jungle of Ecuador over a 128kb DSL connection and paying Skype's 2.2 cents a minute, the connection was fine.
Also calling 1-800 numbers with Skype from Ecuador, which does not cost anything, sometimes renders horrible quality (and sometimes it is OK).
In any case, I think their "promotion" was a horrible idea. I would have gladly payed the 2.2 cents a minute from the States to get as good a connection as I do in Ecuador. I wonder how many people think badly of their service because of that.