Skype will charge for calls within Canada and the US

This arti­cle first appeared in my old blog at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/wsodeman?id=269

http://www.informationweek.com/industries/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196603857

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/technology/13skype.html

Skype had been offer­ing free VoIP calls within the United States and Canada since May 2006.

In 2007, users will have to pay a $30 annual fee to make unlim­ited Skype­Out calls to land­lines and cell phones in these two coun­tries. The cur­rent Skype­Out plan charges users about 2.1 cents per minute.

Calls out­side these two coun­tries will still incur the usual Skype fees.

Skype is offer­ing a spe­cial until Jan­u­ary 31. The US$30 fee is reduced to US$14.95 and includes 100 min­utes of Skype­Out ser­vice, which can be used for inter­na­tional calls.

Skype has been work­ing with mobile phone and com­puter man­u­fac­tur­ers to offer Skype ser­vices on mobile hand­sets. This ser­vice makes sense when the hand­set has 802.11 fea­tures, <a href=“http://billso.com/2006/11/27/wifi-phones>as I dis­cussed on Novem­ber 27. The mobile phone net­work is still too slow to sup­port Skype’s VoIP ser­vices. Next year, Skype is part­ner­ing with Google and Yahoo to offer a Skype WiFi phone.

Still, ana­lysts are won­der­ing how Skype fits into eBay’s cor­po­rate strat­egy. eBay spent US$2.5 bil­lion to pur­chase Skype in Octo­ber 2005. Given Skype’s ros­ter of 136 mil­lion reg­is­tered users, eBay paid about US$18 per user.

Tagged as: Canada, eBay, free, Google, mobile, network, revenue, Skype, strategy, technology, USA, VoIP