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Skype's Free Phone Call Plan Will Soon Have Annual Fee
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."
This is straight from the textbook: give them a free taste of something for long enough to realise they like it, then introduce a "reasonable" fee. Most of them will feel like they can't live without it and accept the fee rather than go without.
FTFA:
But potentially more significant innovations are planned for next year, when Skype will introduce services with Yahoo and Google that will allow Web surfers to click a button and call a business they have found during a search.
Mr. Albert said the concept, known as "click to call," was an important example of combining eBay's expertise in online sales with Skype's capacity to allow people to make inexpensive calls.
Industry analysts have mixed opinions about how successful such a program can be and whether it can help justify the hefty price eBay paid for Skype.
Well, if there is a patent involved in this "click to call" thing, and it turns out to be popular, I think there could be lots of dollars out there.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
You've got a deal. Free would be nice, but not bad considering I can call anywhere anytime for that much...
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Could anyone explain to me why Skype is so popular ? Is it simply a case of they marketed the best and had the easiest to use software ? They certainly aren't any good when it comes to following standards (SIP). Their voice quality is certainly much worse than a good SIP connection, or MSN, or Ventrilo and it's probably even worse than Teamspeak. There's amazingly high latency in most Skype calls I've ever tried. So tell me, why is it so damn popular ?
Just use teamspeak. Skype is overrated.
Are you viral marketing?
The SkypeOut page says it will only be $14.99. I always recommend taking the word from the good old horses mouth.
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
Early on, it was a hallmark of Google to hold off on charging for their web services. When others were prominently charging and hawking, they resisted... the philosophy paid off for Google, looks like. The situation for voice calls, however, may be totally different.
Once they start charging they come under a new set of laws that makes them a regulated telecom. when they were not charging it was arguable they were not under the regulation jurisdiction of the US justice dept or FCC. Thus by giving it away for free they built up a lot of anti-establishement street cred. That's a nice bit of viral marketing buzz.
Now they will have to include backdoors for phone line tapping under US laws if they operate inside the USA. Sure they may be based outside the US and have global customers. Think that makes a whoot of difference to the Justice department? Might as well say the same for cocaine dealers: they may operate in the US but their corporate headquarters is in Medelin Columbia.
Any how, welcome to the Machine, skype.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Here are a few more that I have been working on:
Click-to-change-channels
Click-to-order-sofas
Click-to-hangup
Click-to-start-microwave
patents pending of course
Skype out started as a pay service the (with much aplomb) they announced they'd make it free for calls through the end of the year. Honestly, I'd consider this pretty generous. Kind of a win-win for people who were interested in using it (or computer people who were savvy and interested in free calls).
./). I'm not 100% sure, but as I recall their price was cheap, but I don't suspect $30 a year flat-fee cheap (I charged mine with about $10 and used it until I got bored/distracted, which happens frequently).
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!).
Quack, quack.
Does teamspeak allow my grandmother (and the rest of my family) to call me on a traditional UK phone number number when I'm in Belgium?
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Skype has some serious issues with billing. Their CC processor rejects most peoples GOOD credit cards. I had 3 perfectly good cards rejected when I tried to purchase SkyeIn. After looking in their forums, I see I am not alone. There are literally 100s of posts by people who could not pay with their billing system and to add salt to the wounds Skype was ignoring the trouble tickets they created for their problems.
Maybe their software is ok, but their billing system sucks and the way they treat their customers having problems is basically unheard of, especially when you consider the problems they are having is they are trying to PAY Skype but CANT.
They do market to the masses, not just the geeks and such. My wife who is woefully ignorant of anything computers and even has trouble programming the features on her cell phone, can easily handle the features and calling principles in Skype.
/. or what we all do on here. There is a whole wide world out there of what I affectionately refer to as "Normal People".. :-)
You have to admit that they did do a very good job in marketing and whom ever was responsible for that marketing should see a nice reward.
I don't know where you got the idea that their voice quality was so poor. The calls that I've made on it are fabulous and my wife has been trained to just open her laptop, click Skype, select who she wants to chat with, and when they answer, just sit and chat with a very good sounding speaker phone. It's really cool to see her doing that.
Remember that many of us on here have families that don't have a clue about
Cheers;
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Does teamspeak allow my grandmother (and the rest of my family) to call me on a traditional UK phone number number when I'm in Belgium?
No. However, it'll help her coordinate with the rest of the raid in her guild's next Ony run.
Sheesh. Get some perspective.
I thought *I* had the bad memory problems!
:) @ $30 its a good deal for people who would use it, those that don't can either use something like SIP (although a SIP to POTS service is going to....cost!) or stick with their free cell minutes.
It was never intended to be a free service, just a splashy promotion. I don't think VOIP to POTS is going to be free (they do have to have call centers somewhere to connect those calls, right).
Anyway, no free rides.
Quack, quack.
Then it jumps to $30.
Anyone remember when cable TV was ad free?
Anyone who has ever used Ekiga will never use Skype again. Ekiga is a VoIP client with video and IM capability, phone book, etc. and it has excellent sound quality. You can get the software here: http://ekiga.org/ and if you don't have a VoIP address yet you can get one here: http://ekiga.net/ or here: http://www.freeworlddialup.com/
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
- 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.
SIP is better then Skype anyway.
You can do more with SIP then you can with Skype.
Skype is a proprietary protocol, and the company, is owned by eBay.
Who really wants to be with them?
Why not check out some real VoIP providers?
Is this story "viral marketing"? Is Slashdot the PRWeb for trendy techy businesses?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Tried paying for my girlfriend's account on Paypal (which is convenient for my Canadian Credit-Card due to conversion charges etc), it went through and then for some reason came back and refunded the charge (didn't work). I ended up paying for it with my less-used credit-card which converts currencies for free (but I don't get travel points on it like I do the one attached to Paypal).
(And yes, I know it wouldn't be hard to track this. Just wondering if it's explicitly verboten.)
Do other free VOIP services exist, possibly?
None of those services you mewntioned allow me to call any PTSN phone, routed over the internet, FOR FREE.
You're basically getting for free (plus the small initial cost of a USB PTSN adapter for your PC ) a service that Vonage charges $20 a month for. Sure, Vonage also gives you an inbound number - but guess what - you can get that from SkypeIn fro $30 mor per year.
So for $60 / year you have unlimited phone service. How much is your local telco charging you PER MONTH now?
Sotarting next year the service won't be "free", but it'll only be $30 PER YEAR ($14.95 / year if you sign up now). I'd like you to point me at another unlimited long distance plan that can call any PTSN number for $30 per year.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=l&hl=en&q=google&nea r=Mountain+View,+CA&ie=UTF8&z=12&om=1
If you see the result, it already has a "call" link by the phone numbers.
Will this service of Skype with $14 per year fee also work with their Skype phone (from Netgear and others) ? In that case it makes good sence, in that you don't have to be tethered to the computer for making any call. I mean if I use this service as my main calling plan, my wife will certainly not sit on the computer to make a call each time to her friends. We need something like what Vonage provides in that you are free to move around the house. Some stable wireless phone which connects to Skype via the wireless router
...no,I think the cable guys always lied about that, but I do remember when the largest TV screen you could get was around 9 inches and all the stations (all is in "a couple"), and OTA because that is all there was, went off the air at midnight, well, they replaced the programming with a test pattern, then went off the air. And it was a real test pattern, too, BTW. There were commercials on the shows, but not near as many as today.
now, don't get off my lawn, mow it!
Of course, for people in other countries, this may be a good deal. For those of us who use Skype to call family in the US, it is not.
I'm having trouble locating one on that website you gave.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I don't know about everyone else, but I've found that Skype's "free" calls from the US to other US phones to be horrible.
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.
SHOCKED!
How does encryption sit with providing the US government with a 'wire'-tap back door? If it's true PKI and I'm confident of the public key on the other end of the line, not even Skype can get in, unless their software is doing something nasty, like referring the decrypted stream back to Uncle Sam. If it's not - perhaps Skype servers 'manage' the keys so you don't have to worry about trusting the other party's key - then Uncle Sam truly is the man in the middle.
In the latter case, do you have anything to hide? I do - my privacy.
"Oh, sure! First you get us hooked and then you jack up the price!"
When implemented smartly (see http://ojophone.com/) NATs and firewalls (including symmetric) are no problem. Are there corporate firewalls that Skype will get through that STUN/UPnP/ICE/TURN won't? Yes - firewalls in corporations are sometimes configured to stop stuff. Are there home/consumer NAT/Firewalls that those don't work on? Very few, if any. The problem is that many of the older SIP hardware used by some of the SIP phone services doesn't implement those. Or simply use SBCs (Session Border Controllers) to relay traffic, which many VoIP companies do (instead of relaying through someone else's random connection). Sometimes, the relays selected by Skype simply don't work well.
Using peers as relays DOES help reduce the costs to Skype compared to SBCs, though.
Asterisk is NOT really SIP-based; it uses SIP but in many ways it's an afterthought; the fundamental design of Asterisk is typical PBX - smart server, dumb extensions. IAX and IAX2 are designed primarily for inter-PBX trunking, not as replacements for SIP/H.323/etc.
SIPPhone and their free softclient make things about as easy as Skype, and support dial-in and dial-out. They're not as big as Skype, though, but they're not small.
Encryption - there are SIP standards for encryption (SRTP - RFC 3711, etc). It is absolutely the case that Skype's is easier to use, since you can't disable it. Just don't assume the government can't tap it (Skype is required to comply with CALEA). Some SIP phones (Ojo again) include encryption by default.
It's like one of those emails conservatives were sending around a few years ago with "actual" quotes from John Kerry and so forth explaining how they mostly want to massage Osama's feet, and maybe buy him a pony.
I was hoping at least for something funny... but arguments including "Atheist cries until theist goes away" aren't doing it.
or:
ARGUMENT FROM CROCKERY
1. Pots can give orders to the potter as long as the pots think they are morally superior somehow.
2. Therefore, God doesn't exist.
Hmm, yeah.
If you want to evangelize, what's wrong with doing it honestly?
If you want to make arguments for God's existence, why not do that, and address the *actual* counter-arguments, instead of hoping to trick confused people into thinking this is the best the non-believers have to offer?
I have no idea if you wrote any of these; you're supporting it either way.
hi all,
does anyone know if this service is or will be SIP-based? i have a VoIP phone that steals wireless from wherever you are and speaks SIP and makes calls to any phone. i'm currently on a university beta test, but as soon as the beta test ends it may cost money to make calls, and this may be a better deal for me if it can work with the phone.
One correct headline is: "Skype's free phone call plan will soon be ending".
I use both SIP and Skype, but overall I feel that SIP is a better solution.
Skype to Skype calls work very well, but the quality of Skype to PTSN us less than acceptable. Even though 'Skype Out' is presently free, I've usually had to pick up a real phone to complete my call because of excessive latency, dropouts, and overall poor frequency response. It's definitely worse than a bad cell phone connection - not a service that I would ever consider paying for. The other problem with Skype is that there are no low cost stand alone network adapters as there are with SIP. A computer or an expensive Skype phone is required to complete the call. Furthermore, bandwidth on your computer and network can be used to process calls for other Skype users even though you are not making a call, as long as the application is running.
I also use SIP with Free World Dialup service and Direct IP dialing. My Sipura SIP adapter has 2 connections. An ethernet cable to my router provides the network connection and a regular telephone plugs into the adapter. The system runs stand alone 24/7 without a computer. Everything works like a normal phone. NAT is minor an annoyance, but not a serious problem. I supply my real IP address to the SIP adapter and the problem is solved. I've never needed to use a STUN server. Overall, the quality has been as good or better than PTSN.
And skype doesn't charge any of it. I never (at least not yet) have to have any skypeout credit to call other skype users online. I make voice calls to my daughter overseas all the time, using skype and only recently started keeping money in a "group account" so we can call each other's landlines and she can call her friends back here in the USA.
Calls to most landline destinations are less than 2 cents per minute, though some are quite a bit more. I think I paid some 20 cents per minute to call Tibet last year. But to Europe, the USA and most of Asia (I haven't called Africa so I can't speak to that) it's still very cheap to call landlines using skype. I can also get a skypein number for a few dollars a month and have people call computer or leave me voicemail, or even forward that to my cell phone or whatever.
It's easy to use, has no setup issues that I've heard of, and is cross-platform, while maintaining a respectable price. What more can you ask for?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
like http://www.accutalk.net/ and http://www.accuconference.com/ You can do everything skype can do and it works great
With the Internet Call Wizard, Skype is my home phone. It costs me $4/mo + $0.02/min, and I can't tell the difference between that and my old regular phone service, except with Skype I don't get surprised by random charges for calls I thought "fit the mold" of my calling plan, or crazy taxes, and I have to dial 011 + area code even for local calls, which my wife and I have both gotten used to. Of course last year I didn't even pay the $0.02/min because of the promotion, and with the amount my wife uses the phone :) the $15/year offer will pay for itself in the first month.
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Good deal this will kill it off, at least on my network....could not be happier unless of course they raised
it to say $100 for all calls.
Got Code?
Is it just me, or am I the only person who has trouble with touchtones on SkypeOut? I've called my cellphone, hit a number on my computer, and not heard anything go through to the cell phone.
No, I will not work for your startup