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Skype Pro launches today - and we're STILL not impressed

by Bob Crabtree on 21 February 2007, 22:59

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qahxs

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Internet phone company Skype today launched in Europe its new Pro pricing plan for chargeable calls to landlines and mobiles, so we know at last full details of what the service is going to cost.

Unfortunately, we're no more impressed now than when we first wrote about the scheme on January 18. See, Skype Pro promises 'disruptive pricing' but how disruptive is it?

What we've learnt isn't a great deal - mainly what the monthly charge of €2.30 (inc VAT at 15%) translates to in pounds, £1.73, which is on top of the 3.3p (4.5 Euro cents) connection charge that Skype introduced across the board in January for every landline or mobile call.

Oh, and that and the fact that the only sign-up option initially is for five months!

Skype is offering some incentives that might make you willing to try the service for five months. Trouble is, as well as currently being the only sign-up option, it costs £8.65, so there's not even a discount for agreeing to take the service for that period.

The incentives to sign up are:

* A one-off €30 (ex-VAT) discount on SkypeIn numbers. That equates to a potential saving of around £20

* A €5 (roughly £3.30) Skype credit

* A €30 (£20) discount on a highly-desirable Philips VoIP841 combined Skype/DECT phone, due soon in the Skype Shop at £149 - see, Philips PC-free Skype/DECT phone finally coming next month

* A €10 (£6.70) discount on an SMC WSKP100 WiFi phone, currently selling in the Skype shop for £92

* Additional but unspecified discounts on a series of Skype Extras, including desktop sharing, avatars, emoticons and ring tones


Superficially, these incentives more than cover the cost (£8.65) of a five-month sign-up. However, it's disappointing to see Skype pitching the VOIP841 at £149, which is £19 more than Philips' suggested price, and not to be able to sign up for less than five months.

If you do sign up, you'll also be getting free Skype Voicemail, too. That would otherwise cost £3.45 for three months or £11.50 (€17.25) for a year – unless, that is, you buy a SkypeIn number, in which case, as before, voicemail would already have been free.

When that five months is near its end, though, do check whether it's still worth your while sticking with Skype Pro, which you can subscribe to thereafter on a month-by-month basis.

Given how difficult is to make sense of the charges made by any phone or internet service provider, Skype included, it's really not easy to get a good fix on which of all the companies out there is offering the best value. 

And that's our mealy-mouthed excuse for not having compared the cost of Skype Pro with a whole bunch of competitors. What we did do, though, is look closer to home at the costing we understand best - the "free" phone service we have with Pipex and which we know only too well doesn't even offer the best deals out there.

Pipex charges us a monthly phone fee of  £4.25 (inc VAT) and, for that, we can make up to 3,000 minutes of free calls day and night to UK 01 and 02 numbers each month.

We're also paying a £23.44 monthly fee to Pipex for 1Mb broadband - which we'd still have to pay if we switched over to making all calls via Skype Pro. On top of that is BT's monthly line rental of £11 but, again, we'd still be paying that if we bought into Skype Pro.

For the record, we've tried repeatedly to switch to a better-value Pipex scheme with phone and 8Mb broadband but have been told over and over that the only way to do that - because of limitations with Pipex's backend software - would be to cancel our existing subscription and phone deal and sign up all over again, losing our vital broadband connection for an unknown period of time.

That may well be true (though it's pathetic if it is) but to us it smacks of a big con.

We looked at what we'd been charged by Pipex for calls over two monthly periods - Nov 06-Dec 06 and Dec 06-Jan 07 - and worked out what the cost would have been to make those same calls with Skype Pro.

Between Nov and December 06, we made 61 "free" calls via Pipex and the total cost was £4.99 (our monthly fee to Pipex), making the average call cost 8.2p.

Skype Pro would have produced a £1.25 saving with those 61 calls - the total cost being £3.74 and the average call cost 6.1p. That's based on the Skype Pro monthly fee of £1.73, plus a connection charge of 3.3p per call.

Between Dec 06  and Jan 07, we made 47 "free" calls via Pipex and the total cost was £4.99, making the average call cost 11p. Skype Pro would again have produced a saving, this time of £1.71, the total cost being £3.28 and the average call cost 7p.

But it's our expectation that a lot more calls are made from many businesses and homes than we made during those two periods via Pipex, so we did 11 other cost comparisons between Pipex and Skype Pro. These involve making between 50 and 1000 calls to 01/02 numbers in a month.

The two services have the same average cost when making 100 calls per month but, thereafter, the cost per call becomes less with Pipex and lessens progressively as more calls are made each month.

At the 250-calls stage, the per-call cost for Pipex is half that of Skype Pro and when you reach 750 (which you may or may not think is a lot), each Skype Pro call is five times more expensive with Pipex - which we've already said, isn't offering the best deals around.

Provider

Calls per month

Cost per call - £

Pipex

50

0.100

Skype Pro

50

0.068

Pipex

100

0.050

Skype Pro

100

0.050

Pipex

150

0.033

Skype Pro

150

0.045

Pipex

200

0.025

Skype Pro

200

0.042

Pipex

250

0.020

Skype Pro

250

0.040

Pipex

300

0.017

Skype Pro

300

0.039

Pipex

350

0.014

Skype Pro

350

0.038

Pipex

400

0.012

Skype Pro

400

0.037

Pipex

500

0.010

Skype Pro

500

0.036

Pipex

750

0.007

Skype Pro

750

0.035

Pipex

1000

0.005

Skype Pro

1000

0.035



Ignoring the goodies available for signing up for five months, about the only sort of appeal Skype Pro appears to us to have is to small businesses that make very few calls and are using cable for their phone and internet connection but haven't yet sorted out any especially good deals with Virgin Mobile for doing so.

So, we reckon that Skype absolutely must lower its per-call charge and probably its monthly charge, too, if aiming for Skype Pro to be a success, rather than a certain failure.

Fair or not? Check out Skype's press release on page two - and also our original piece about Skype Pro - then tell us what you think in the HEXUS.community.

HEXUS.links

HEXUS.community :: discussion thread about this article

HEXUS.lifestyle.headline :: Skype Pro promises 'disruptive pricing' but how disruptive is it?
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External.links

Skype - Skype Pro home page
Skype - home page