[asterisk-biz] Skype Free International Calls

[Henry.Coleman]

As far as B2B is concerned, the biggest selling point is going to be
inter-office communications. As you mention, the cost of LD calls is
falling to zero so the only factor left in the equation is the QoS of the
service provided. Meanwhile, "VoIP" has become the new marketing buzzword
for any telephony product or service. It's much easier to get clients
excited about a VoIP than a software based telephone system. It won't be
long before some marketing guys think up how you can have VoIP soap
powder.

-- 
Henry Coleman [VoIP-PBX.ca]

> 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 :)
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