1300 reasons to avoid Skype Pro in Australia

By Tony Austin
Sunday, 18 November 2007 09:51

Opinion and Analysis

There are examples all around us of misleading and deceptive advertising, inflicted upon us either deliberately or due to the lack of attention to detail or even the incompetence of the advertisers. Where does Skype Pro stand in this regard?

Yes, it's yet another story about Skype, sorry about that but it's purely coincidental, and I'm forging ahead regardless! Anyhow, this article is not about the technology, but the details of how the Skype Pro service offering is advertised and how this turns out to be extremely expensive for Australian users when calling certain types of landline numbers.

By way of introduction, I'd regard myself as an innocent (?) technologist, merely a layman when it comes to advertising and the legalities thereof. To switch to an entirely different industry for a moment, I recently came across a local brand of milk that I'd never heard of before. In the client's refrigerator, sitting nest to a carton labelled (in capitals) LOW FAT was another one of the same brand labelled NO FAT.

As en ex-chemistry teacher, I know that milk gets its white color due to the suspension of tiny particles of fat in water, therefore what my scientific reasoning told me to expect to find in the NO FAT carton was a clear liquid. No surprises, though, when what came out was a white liquid! The compliance label clearly indicates that it does contain fat, albeit at a rather low percentage. Is this an example of deceptive advertising? Should it not have been labelled ULTRA LOW FAT or some such thing?

Moving on, I'm not here claiming that Skype has set out to be deliberately deceptive or misleading in the way that it describes costs for the Skype Pro service. But I got a nasty and quite unexpected shock when I saw the cost of one of the first calls that I made to an Australian landline

PLEASE READ ON...