Skype now 100% calls to USA/Canada landlines

[MrHat]

From the Press Release

Is it really free? What are the strings attached?

Yes. It is really very, very free. There’s no prepayment, no minimum use, no subscription, no monthly fee, no nothing. You just download and install Skype and then you start calling. Both the caller and the number called must be in either the US or Canada. There are no strings attached.

The only condition is that we have said free SkypeOut within the US and Canada is guaranteed to last until the end of this year — that is, until December 31, 2006. We’re not quite sure yet what we will do after that. Maybe we extend the free period, maybe not. You’ll hear more about this towards the end of the year.

Until then, happy calling.

This is awesome. I use this program all the time for int'l calls and USA calls.  Now it's going to be free for most of it, and it works well too.

I am the mole.  Goodbye.

[Sairon]

A guy at the college I went to last year wrote Skype, it's been well known in Sweden for quite some time now. About ½ a year ago he sold the program to ebay/google, can't remember which, for a couple of billion dollars.

[Margalis]

Sold it to Ebay. They have no idea what they are going to do with it. They have a lot of money and money burns a hole in your pocket.

It's similar to Time-Warner buying AOL - they have some unrealistic "convergence" plan that is never going to happen.

[Krakrok]

Bleh. It ate my post.

--

eBay was suppost to intergrate Skype so you could contact the auction buyer/seller with it. Earthlink has a similar product (Mindspring) running the open SIP/SAP protocol. Wonder how they are going to compete with 100% free minutes now.

I'm not impressed with VoIP mainly because I remember using the Internet Phone software 10-12 years ago.

[Margalis]

Why would I want to talk to the seller over the phone? Sounds like a pain in the ass.

[eldaec]

The deal ebay did seems even more bizarre when you consider that Mr. Skype (or whatever) had maybe 3 more years at most to dominate this market before it'll probably become 'standard' PC/ISP functionality.

[Ironwood]

My brother uses this to contact his future wife in Canada.  I didn't know what he was talking about until I saw this post and ran a little research.

Bravo.   The internet is the future.  But don't quote me on that.

[UD_Delt]

I've been using Vonage for the last 6 months or so and have been happy with it. $17/month for local and long distance with all the usual options (caller id, voice mail, etc...). We're on the limited plan which is something like 800 outgoing minutes/month. Incoming calls don't count against that. Between that and the 800 or so cell minutes we've never gone over.

For a long time we didn't have a land line at all but my wife got irritated by the fact that I didn't often keep my cell phone charged or carry it with me which would make me unreachable even when I was at home.


Does Skype hook up to an actual phone or do you have to use a PC mic and your PC speakers?

[Sairon]

I belive you can hook them up to a phone. The place I formerly worked at was planning on switching to voip in the near future, and I belive they were going to use Skype in some way. Anyway, imagine the savings possible for a company with telemarketers. They can configure it to instantly dial the number to the next person in the list, so there's no down time inbetween calls. I've also heard of a little plugin to skype which you can connect to your webcam. If it detects any motion on the webcam it automaticaly dials to a specified number. Cheap surveilence.

On another note, what happend to the spell checker? I spell like a monkey  :-(

[Lantyssa]

I've been using Vonage for the last 6 months or so and have been happy with it. $17/month for local and long distance with all the usual options (caller id, voice mail, etc...). We're on the limited plan which is something like 800 outgoing minutes/month. Incoming calls don't count against that. Between that and the 800 or so cell minutes we've never gone over.

I have the basic Vonage package, too.  I don't need the phone all that often and SBC kept findingways to ding me on a line I use at most an hour a month.  They have good international rates according to friends.

If you do not have a reliable network connection though, VoIP is not a good choice.

[Trippy]

On another note, what happend to the spell checker? I spell like a monkey  :-(

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