* Skype enables calling between PC and PSTN-connected phones
Over the past few months, we’ve been contrasting the capabilities of various messaging services. We found that AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Messenger and Skype each had sufficient strengths and weaknesses to make it impossible to declare a clear winner. But Skype, which already had arguably the easiest-to-use “click to talk” capabilities, recently upped the ante considerably by offering gateway services to the PSTN for most of the world.
PC-to-PC calls have always been available with Skype at no charge. With the PC-to-PSTN option, Skype’s pricing structure is set such that calls from a PC to many countries in North America, Western Europe and Australia are all the same fee per minute. Since the pricing is in Euros, we’ll explain.
Calling credits are purchased in increments of 10, 25, or 50 Euros. Then the calls are charged on a per-Eurocent basis. For instance, calls to landlines in the continental U.S., Canada, Australia, France, the U.K., and several other countries are 1.7 Eurocents per minute. There’s no discount for calling within your home country. Using a conversion rate of 1.233 U.S. dollars per Euro, this is about 2.1 cents per minute.
For domestic calling within the U.S., this is good, but not earth-shaking. It’s important to note that the rates to a country are the same regardless of whether you’re in that country or not. So the rate of 2.1 cents per minute to the U.S. is a much better deal when calling to California from France than it is when calling from across the country, across the state, or across the street. Also, the flat rate for calls, say, between France and the U.S. is even more attractive for calls _to_ the U.S. than for calls _from_ the U.S. because the price for PSTN calls is generally much more expensive for calls to the U.S. from Europe than for the same call from the U.S.
For international calling, this can be extremely attractive. For instance, this week Larry is traveling in Europe. Steve called Larry at his hotel in Paris, and they talked for a little over six minutes for 15 cents. On another occasion, Steve talked to an associate in the Netherlands for 15 minutes for 32 cents. And while the call quality was not perfect, it was certainly acceptable.
Next time we’ll look at some of the details of this service.
