I know I evangelize the Skype internet phone service a great deal as a highly cost-effective communication tool, and I make no excuses for that …
I just concluded a call with a business friend where we both use Skype. I’m here in The Netherlands, he’s there in the UK. We chatted for 45 minutes, totally for free.
Here’s another example. Shel Holtz and I do our weekly podcasts via Skype. Including all the set up and testing time, we’re probably speaking for an hour and a half each time, he in California, me in Amsterdam. All for free.
Cost effective, obviously! But what if you want to make a call to someone who doesn’t have Skype?
You’d use the paid-for Skype offering called SkypeOut, which is where you really can save money as well.
I have no better example than this. Yesterday, I was in a conference call for nearly 35 minutes to a number in the US, in California. I dialled-in to the call using Skype. Total cost – just under 60 eurocents, about 80 cents US or 42 pence UK. For a 35-minute international phone call at a time that’s not the cheap rate as charged by the phone company.
The first amount after ‘USA’ is the cost per minute (which is less than two eurocents). Next is the call duration and then the total cost of the call.
I use Skype’s services increasingly for my business calls and, indeed, for all outbound international calls.
Skype has gaps, to be sure, compared to normal phone services. The main one – no one can call you from a normal telephone. But that’s not a big deal: they just call you on your normal phone, or get Skype themselves.
Skype continues to improve the service and offer new functionality, such as the multi-chat function enabled in the new version of Skype software for Windows introduced last week. A big and highly appealing improvement soon could be voicemail which Skype is testing at the moment.
In my view, Skype is the only way to phone.
Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.
Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.
