SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 08:07

Opinion and Analysis

SkypeOut enables you to make inexpensive voice calls from your PC to the switched telephone network, to destinations anywhere in the world. Here's an update on call quality and pricing plans, as well as a dose or two of web site design and content management advice for Skype.

Earlier, in SkypeOut voice quality - Part 1 and SkypeOut voice quality - Part 2, I gave my impressions of the reliability and clarity of voice calls made from one's PC to the PSTN (public switched telephone network) using SkypeOut.

And in 1300 reasons to avoid Skype Pro in Australia I expressed my displeasure in the confused messages given out by Skype about their web site concerning what they mean by the term "landline" and the way that calling some Australian numbers that we here regard as landlines can easily cost you more than your monthly SkypeOut subscription does.

Please scan those articles first before proceeding, as I won't be covering the same ground again. Rather, in today's article I'll give a brief update on my current impressions of SkypeOut voice quality and then move on to issues about SkypeOut pricing and usage terms, finishing off with a few money-saving tips.

What I have to add about SkypeOut voice quality is short and to the point. Firstly, as is made apparent by the regular Call Quality Feedback surveys taken after every few calls upon hanging up, together with software improvements (as in Skype client version 3.8), it's apparent that that Skype is focusing seriously on improving voice clarity.

Based on my own informal survey conducted for the last six months or more while making some 50 to 100 calls every month, I'm now prepared to say fairly definitively that intra-Australian SkypeOut calls have improved to the point of being quite good enough for most purposes, especially in view of Skype's quite low prices. I don't have firm figures, but I find that perhaps 19 out of every 20 SkypeOut calls, or even 29 out every 30, are perfectly acceptable.

That's not as good as using regular PSTN landline services, but even they are not perfect. For example, several times recently while calling leading Australian carrier Telstra's BigPond ISP customer support landline number (133933), I found its interactive voice response system to be so staccato and broken up that it was quite unusable.

So SkypeOut is good enough for me, and I yet don't have any compelling reason to switch over to an alternative VoIP provider (such as Engin or Freshtel, in Australia). Your own experience with SkypeOut might be different, dependent on a number of variables like your broadband provider's networking infrastructure, reliability and speed.

Now that the question of my staying with SkypeOut is settled, I'll move on to discussing in some detail the effectiveness of the Skype web site and my experience of Skype's extremely unpredictable and unresponsive customer service. Considering that the SkypeOut service is pretty good, it's a shame that the web site and customer service levels leave a lot to be desired. (Of course, they're not by any means the only large service provider where this can be said.)

My aim in what follows is to describe aspects that I find confusing and unclear for SkypeOut pricing and terms of use, in the spirit of providing useful feedback and guidance to help them tweak their web site's layout and content so as to  improve certain confusing elements and fill several information gaps about current SkypeOut offerings.

PLEASE READ ON ...