[asterisk-biz] Skype Free International Calls

[Sikaspam]

Hi,

Without quoting what has come before in this thread, someone at Asticon
said yesterday that phone minutes will eventually reach zero or so close
to zero they won't count for much.

Skype, like it or not, remains a good idea and will probably be around
for a while if they can be clever enough to imagine new and better
services. The kicker is, this is good advice to anyone selling
asterisk-related (or not for that matter) voIP service, and it was the
point being made at Astricon: it's service, not cost of minutes that
will become primary in the future. (note: Unless they tax the crap out
of all providers driving prices way up.)

IMO, price is already not at all the best reason to use voIP, although
ironically, it's voIP that broke the price structure. At the time of
this writing, you can call Europe "free" (single channel gerenous but I
believe limited number of minutes) from the US and you can call the US
"free" from Europe within the limits of your service subscription.
SetGlobalVar(free=€29.95 a month). In France, for that amount, you can
get ADSL 20 meg down, 200 TV channels and "unlimited" calling to many
countries. Number portability has become a major issue (duh) but for
once this is being addressed by a law that should require all ports to
happen within 10 days, as I understand it.

Back to Skype. Many of Skype's 200,000 daily downloads are business
users. They like the idea of have a text chat channel open all day when
on the road with a single click to use voice chat or even conference.

Like many of you, I hate Skype, but only because there's no good API to
connect asterisk to it so I have to call a Skype DID to talk to some
people we work with (if they have paid for this service) where I'd
rather have them registered to our pbx or at least be able to call them
"directly".

I doubt Skype will be going away anytime soon, so get over it :)