SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

The Skype Pro plan is now superseded, replaced by "Unlimited Country" and "Unlimited World" plans. In the newer plans, you pay a flat rate regardless of the number of calls you make per month.

If you look at the illustration on the previous page (open the large version) you'll see near the bottom (highlighted with a big red arrow) that Skype has  a page for its fair usage policy.

Notice that this refers to the so-called unlimited plans having "a fair usage limit of 10,000 minutes per user per month" which seems exceptionally fair to me -- but still not strictly "unlimited" -- and it's certainly a big increase on the 3,000 minutes per month that I believe applies to the old Skype Pro plan.

Another page describes the connection fee for SkypeOut calls (expressed in local currency rather than Euros).

Skype fair use policy

SkypeOut connection fee

I remain on the old Skype Pro plan for now, undecided whether to change over to one of the newer plans, since there's not much in it for me one way or the other. The reason for not upgrading is that these days I only average some 50 to 80 calls per month, some of which are at zero cost (a tip about this later).

Let's say that I make as many as 60 calls in a given month. This will cost me (in round figures) 2 Euros for the Skype Pro monthly fee plus 60 times the connection fee of (approximately) 0.033 Euro, totalling very close to 4 Euros, which is about what the "unlimited country" fee is at the moment (it's 3.95 Euros, with European VAT being inapplicable here Down Under).

If I were to start consistently making, say, 80 or more calls per month then the arithmetic would sway me towards changing over to the Unlimited Country plan. I don't make all that many international calls, so there's little incentive to choose the Unlimited World plan (another 5 Euros per month). I'll note here that there are several other features of the "unlimited" plans to consider, such as being able to get an online number, but these features happen to have little value for me the way I operate.

In your own case, dependent on your call usage pattern, the above may well lead to a different conclusion. And anyway, the old Skype Pro plan is no longer available to new users, so you'd have to choose between Unlimited Country and Unlimited World.

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