Skype go monthly: 'unlimited' no contract call packages available and pretty damn cheap too

Isn’t Skype great? Well, not if you’re BT, I suppose, but for us users, free voice and video calls from from computer to computer worldwide is an absolute godsend.

Of course, as nice as they are at Skype, you still have to pay when calling house phones or mobiles but you can always do that on a pay-as-you-go basis at very reasonable rates.

Well, it seems they’ve decided to be even more reasonable and sell monthly packages now too. There’s no long contracts but there are three different “unlimited calls” price bands to chose from: “Unlimited Country” (£1.95) for calls to landlines in one country, “Unlimited Europe” (£2.95) for calls to any of their 20 European countries and “Unlimited Worldwide” (£6.95) for calls to any of their 34 worldwide countries.

Now, this all very good but there are a few caveats. Firstly, as you may have noticed, 34 is not the number of countries in the world. This “worldwide” package features no countries in Africa or South America, which as far as I’m concerned represent quite a large proportion of the world.

Secondly, “unlimited” doesn’t mean unlimited. No. “Unlimited” means up to 10,000 minutes per month or five hours each day. Now, that’s not a problem for most people but there’s someone who’s going to be caught out by that one. You know who you are.

Thirdly, the prices quoted are without VAT. I hate it when they do that. With VAT you’re looking at £2.24, £3.39 and £7.99 respectively.

Lastly, do your maths. Some countries are very cheap to call anyway. If you only use Skype for calling your mum in Australia, then that only comes in at 1.4p/minute anyway, so you’ll need to be making more than 570 minutes of calls per month for the worldwide package to be worth while.

If, however, you old dear’s on a mobile out there, than I’d go for it as it’ll only take an hour before you start reaping the dividends. You get the picture. Do the maths.

So on the whole, yes. Good Skype. Well done, and sit.

Best of all, there’s an offer on until 1st June where you can get three months for the price of two. So, if this is for you, you’d better get your skates on.

Skype (via pocket-lint)

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