With Liberty and Skype for All
Last week, our friends at mobile carrier 3 - purveyors of the Skype-enabled X-Series handset line and needs-no-introduction 3 Skypephone - announced their newest plan to mobilize the Skype Nation. They’ve opened up their network to allow all 3 customers with a compatible 3 handset to make unlimited Skype-to-Skype calls - for free.
“From 1 May, there will be no data charges or top-up fees for either contract or pay-as-you-go customers who use Skype on 3’s network. Anyone with a 3 handset will be able to buy a 3 SIM with Skype enabled and talk as much as they want to other Skype users without ever having to pay another penny.”
This is what we like to think of as a win-win (and, well…-win ) situation: 3 customers can bask in the veritable free calling bonanza, Skype’s user base will fatten-up, and 3 should lure some new users onto their network as well (not such a bad thing for 3’s revenue-sharing partners either!)
VentureBeat posted a piece last week which credited 3 UK as reporting that Skype pre-pay users give the operator 20% higher margins than ordinary pre-pay users, and that the Skype offering is driving user uptake, with 79% of all of 3’s Skype users new to the network.
VentureBeat speculates that “[t]he higher margins may very well boil down to the use of iSkoot, which routes Skype on to the voice circuit-switch rather than the more expensive data network. This, argues the company, makes the service less of a data hog than operators traditionally fear VoIP to be.”
While this blogger doesn’t Skype and tell, I WILL go on the record with this: Skype + circuit switch is, as always, the flag we’re proud to fly.
iSkoot have the robust ability to route your Skype calls over the voice channel that your Skype calls sound matches the quality of your normal phone calls. This is the reason why i like it most.