SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

Now we arrive at Skype's pricing page, in the case of international English having the URL http://skype.com/intl/en/prices/ and with the title "What’s free and what costs a little." We're not talking about free PC-to-PC VoIP calls here, and for simplicity we'll stick to pricing in Euros throughout this article.

So far, so good. But this is where things start getting a little hazy. You have to start hunting and jumping around the site to get a total picture of what's on offer. For example, if you click on the Skype Credit link (under "Pay As You Go"), you'll see that (in certain countries) you can purchase hardware like headsets and phones from Skype.

But here we're only discussing using Skype credit to make SkypeOut calls, which is where you're calling from your PC through the PSTN (public switched telephone network) to somebody's landline or mobile/cell phone.

When SkypeOut was first released, you had to pay per minute for each call placed, and that was all you had to know about. Later on, they introduced an option called Skype Pro, where you paid a fixed fee of just under 2 Euros per month. In January 2007 they introduced a connection fee which -- they say -- they found necessary to impose in order to recoup charges placed on them by country carriers (such as Telstra, in Australia).

The major drawcard for Skype Pro was that you could make "unlimited calls to landlines" in your country. Here's where the confusion started to arise.

For example, in the USA the metering for Skype Pro did not work exactly the same as for countries such as Australia, yet this was not at all crystal clear from anything on the Skype web site. They would refer to something on a web page and you were never quite sure whether it applied or not in your country, which was not at all helpful.

If you were lucky, by trawling around the Skype site (or the Skype forum, or an external forum), you might eventually find a clarification, but as often as not you wouldn't.

At one point, I got into series of e-mail interactions with a Skype customer service person who seemed to hear what he wanted to hear, and kept warning me about abiding with the Skype terms and conditions of service that I had signed up for. This was despite my repeatedly protestations that I was only seeking SkypeOut pricing clarification, that I had no issues at all regarding the terms, that I liked the Skype service a lot and intended to keep on using it.

Sick of that drawn-out dialog, I've tried to make contact with any Skype executive who'd be prepared to explain things to me for publication in iTWire, but have gotten absolutely nowhere with this. To me, such difficulty in connecting to and interacting with a responsible executive is a sure indication of a company that hasn't got its act together, and this is why I say that while Skype is very good on the product side its customer service and the "remoteness" or aloofness of its executives leaves much to be desired.

But let's get back to SkypeOut plans and pricing.

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