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Skype Offering SkypeOut Service for Free
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."
Apparantly it doesn't work for people with IPs starting with 7...
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.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
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
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 at 718-387-6962. Now it's free if I call from home as well as work...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
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.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Actually, most cell towers are on independent power backup. They often have a UPS with an on-site generator.
Mind you, that's not ALL of them, but enough that the network doesn't go down entirely in disasters.
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.
Duct tape is like the Force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
I use Gizmo. They may not use an opensource client, but they do use OPEN PROTOCOLS (skype...) Their linux support has alsa been much better for me. Oh, look at that freudian slip! Yes, ALSA actually works without glaring issues. I'm even using it with an external usb microphone! They may not be offering free callout, but for 10$ you get 1000minutes that will not expire for two years. Those same minutes can be used anywhere in the world for the standard rates.
Now, sorry that sounds like an advertisement, but a slashdot article on skype a little while back had me interested in this area, though I knew as soon as I saw skype that it wasn't for me. There is another provider that uses an open client as well, and had the same rates as Gizmo, but I cannot remember them from the top of my head.
Gizmo Project Anyone have links for other "open" providers. I really think they would compliment this article quite well.
I'm not arguing that the country code shound't be required. That just makes sense. It's the plus symbol that is extraneous.
Why? I've survived for several decades without doing this. Why has it suddenly become a requirement?
Yaz.
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 an old fashioned phone. Cell phones don't solve all problems yet.
Penny - plain text accounting
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 much more difficult to tap DSL or cable, decode the call, can transmit that. You'd need a large amount of kit by the house, something that would get noticed easily.
At least with Internet phones the number of people who can reasonably tap in is a bit more restricted (people working at any of th einfrastructure point sbetween your house and theirs). With the PTSSN it's basicall a free for all - anyone can tap in at any point in the line from the wall of your house to the pole - and all they need is a $2.99 handset.