My Christmas present to Skype — yet another geography lesson!

By Tony Austin
Monday, 22 December 2008 09:06

Opinion and Analysis

The most recent ia a series of stories is SkypeOut pricing and voice quality - Part 4 (getting tired of waiting for Skype's reply) and this has links to the earlier stories.

I'm still a very happy and contented user of SkypeOut, that is, VoIP calls from my PC to the PSTN (public switched telephone network).

My experience continues to be that calls to Australian landlines are almost without exception of excellent clarity.

However, the work done by Skype's webmasters and/or web content managers/editors of less than stellar, as you'll have seen in those earlier articles when I've tried to help them clarify Skype's call rates for Australia. It's apparent that the Skype people who created the Australian section of the call rates table don't understand Australia's geopolitics (states and internal/external, territories).

The outcome of all my efforts? To date, not a single clarification as far as I can see, which is pretty pathetic. They still haven't contacted me.

Well, today I just noticed another less-than-perfect (being generous) entry on the Skype web site.

Take a look at their description (as at the time of writing this) of how Skype To Go works, which for the permanent record I've copied below.

The call source is shown by the blue dot, and the call destination is shown by the green dot.

Hey fellas, Austria (green arrow) is where the "governator" was born.

This is getting pretty tedious for me, but to make it easy for you, I've placed a red circle around Australia (land of kangaroos and platypuses).

Please make an attempt to get your Australian facts right, will you?