The Cynic Says……

Well, apparently Skype has decided to make phone calls to the US and Canada completely free. Previously, you were charged about $0.02 per call from the skype client to any of like 9 or 10 countries. Now calls to the US and Canada are completely free. Calls outside the US and Canada are still charged at the global skype rate (currently about $0.02/min), however. If you add on the “SkypeIN” service for about $36 a year, you basically have a phone line for a whopping $3 a month with unlimited incoming and outgoing calls to any number you might wish to call. Sounds like a pretty damn good deal to me! All you need is to download the Skype client and have a broadband internet connection and you’re set to go. The SkypeIN service isn’t mandatory but it IS kind of cool in that you can get a local phone number for people to call you free of charge. Even cooler, the phone number doesn’t have to be local to where you live. That means if you live in one city but you have a bunch of friends in another city you can get a phone number local to them so they don’t have to spend money on long distance in order to call you. Granted, most people have cellphones so they don’t have to worry about long distance charges, but very few people have unlimited daytime minutes so being able to make and recieve phone calls free of charge is kinda cool. Not only that, there are a few cordless phones coming out that will actually work with Skype so you don’t even have to be tied to your computer all the time just to make and receive phone calls. Not only that, some of the handsets being released will actually work on wi-fi so in theory you could use your skype account anywhere you can find a wi-fi hotspot, not just on your home wi-fi network. So at this point, why even bother with a landline? I’m sure between Vonage, Skype and the other VOIP providers the bells are getting pretty annoyed with their landline business being cannibalized. It was bad enough when cellphones became a cheap commodity, now VOIP service is making landlines even less attractive.

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