SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 3

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 16 September 2008 09:07

Opinion and Analysis

What else should I say in my "state of the nation" analysis of the Skype web site and the SkypeOut service, as things currently stand (in September 2008)?

For one thing, there are some bizarre statements on the Skype web site.

For example, in the banner at the top of the Unlimited Country and Unlimited World pages, they state: "Call any time of the day, any day of the week." Hey, I thought the whole purpose of any telephone service is that you are able to do just this! What's so special about Skype's service in this regard?

Maybe the web content producer meant to send a different message, something like: "Flat rate, any time of day or night, any day of the week." It just doesn't come across that way, to me anyhow. This statement definitely needs more reworking.

I'm curious how such statements come out in the other language versions of the site: Italian, or Japanese, or whatever. Is this stumble perhaps due to a less than perfect understanding of spoken English by a non-native speaking web content creator, or due to a strained attempt to render the same concept in multiple languages?

But this is just a small quibble. There's something much more serious that needs urgent amendment.

As mentioned at the outset of this article, I earlier wrote about 1300 reasons to avoid Skype Pro in Australia and explained how the Skype pricing and usage terms web pages do an extremely poor job of accurately defining two things:

(a) Exactly what is meant by "landlines" (to which, it says, you can make "unlimited calls" after handing over your monthly service fee); and

(b) What are all the "special services" or "premium services" in every country where SkypeOut is available, and exactly what are the various per-minute fees for calling these numbers?

Please open this page of the earlier article where you'll see two rows in the table labelled "Australia Shared Cost" and "Australia Special Service" for which the call rates are much higher than for the base landline cost of 0.017 Euros per minutes. What is more, there are other types of destinations in Australia that are not even mentioned in the table, such as what we'd call "1900" numbers, and their call rates a higher again.

I explain in that article why this is a trap for the unwary because in Australia calls to "13" and "1300" numbers are at a flat rate (approximately 25 to 30 Australian cents). Australian users regard these as fixed-rate calls, at a similar rate as for normal local landline calls no matter where you call from in Australia. They expect the same rate for these numbers from any telephone service.

Skype insists that they must charge at a per-minute rate Australian destinations with these "13" and "1300" prefixes, supposedly in order to recoup costs passed on to them by the Australian carrier (which I presume is Telstra). Skype urgently needs to negotiate with the carrier and establish a flat rate fee in the "ball park" that the man in the street expects.

Other VoIP providers charge a fixed rate for these 13/1300 destinations, so why not Skype? Ineptitude, lackadaisical attitude, or what? It beats me, and I'm not the first to complain about this, see for example here or here and particularly Australian's beware: "Shared Cost" rip-off in the Skype community forum where you'll see the same sentiments repeated a number of times.

Has Skype done anything to address this matter? Yes, they have, but it's inadequate.

PLEASE READ ON ...