SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 4 (getting tired of waiting for Skype's reply)

Tony Austin
Tuesday, 28 October 2008 09:05

Opinion and Analysis

I've converted from the original Skype Pro option (no longer available, but it was just under 2 Euros per month, with a but connection fee applied to each call) to the Unlimited Country plan (just under 4 Euros per month, no connection fee, and some other benefits such as a free SkypeIn number).

I don't expecting to be making enough overseas calls any time soon that would justify upgrading to the Unlimited World plan, but have nothing at al against it in principle (it's very good value for money).

I've made numerous SkypeOut calls to "ordinary" Australian landlines (those with dialling prefixes of 02, 03, etc, but not 13 or 1300 and others) and a number of calls to the USA.

One of the international calls was used for recording a long podcast, and it went flawlessly (see IBM's Jackie Olson explains ITSO mission and services). Several other podcasts were recorded to Australian destinations.

An interesting aside is that some people use headsets which, it turns out, aren't always of good audio quality, even if more convenient than holding a handset to the ear. (I wonder of wireless or bluetooth headsets are worse than wired headsets.)

Since voice clarity is important for podcast recordings (not so critical for normal conversations), I've learned to check this before starting recordings and trying to get them to swap over to a better unit if they have that option. So there's a tip if you want to record clear podcasts.

Now let me move on to my only real gripe about SkypeOut, in the Australian context at least — and probably similar for SkypeOut users in some other countries, I'd suspect. It's essentially about the still-confusing SkypeOut pricing and terms of use.

The issue is, exactly what does Skype define a "landline" to be? What explicitly are all of the SkypeOut calls that Skype regards as "special services" of some kind that will be charged for at higher — you could even say, exorbitant — rates?

You'll see from the discussion of my third article here that on 16 September this year a Skype representative called Siim Teller commented: "Thanks for the more than thorough review of SkypeOut and our website. We'll be digging through the article looking for stuff we can improve."

As I pointed out in that article, if you examined the current table entries for SkypeOut call rates to Australian destinations, you'd find the following:

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